| Wear has been recognized as a vital problem in many industries. It results in a loss of durability, reliability, and efficiency and costs tens of billions of dollars annually. Significant effort has been devoted in both experimental and theoretical studies. However, the mechanisms of wear are still poorly understood and therefore wear control is far behind its demand. One way to study wear process is via computer simulation, which has become more powerful with the rapid development in computer facilities and efficient algorithms. It allows observation of atomic scale deformation and therefore it is a very good tool to study wear mechanisms at the nano-scale.; This study presents a series of molecular dynamic simulation of some nano-scale wear processes, such as indentation and plowing, with the goal of exploring the factors that affect wear and predicting wear for different conditions. Molecular Dynamics simulations were carried out on a system that includes an aluminum substrate and a hard tip. Embedded atom method (EAM) and Lennard-Jones potentials were used to describe interactions between atoms. For nano-indentation simulations, both constant indent force and constant loading speed were applied to study the wear mechanisms as well as material properties. Some phenomenon, such as jump-to-contact, local melting, and dislocation nucleation were observed. More importantly, the effects of system temperature, indent force, substrate orientation, tip-substrate bond, indenter shape, boundary condition, and defect concentrations of the substrate were systematically investigated during indentation. The results are in qualitative agreement with limited experimental data. Similar simulations were carried out for plowing. The effects of plowing force, substrate orientation, the tip-substrate bond, and alloy elements are discussed based on the simulation results. In addition, a simple analytic model of plowing behavior is provided. The model reveals two parameters, static friction F0 and dynamic friction coefficient c, which can be used to predict plowing behavior under different forces. |
