Numerical Simulation And Experiment Verification Of Sliding Wear Of Fabric Liner For Self-Lubricating Spherical Plain Bearing

There exists a layer of self-lubricating material between the inner ring and outer ring of self-lubricating spherical plain bearing. Nowadays fabric liner is one of the most important self-lubricating materials. Fabric liner which has significant influence on lifetime and reliability of self-lubricating spherical plain bearing is also one of the key components of it. The wear of fabric liner and bearing fracture are the main failure mode of self-lubricating spherical plain bearing. It is not only time and energy consuming but also a significant cost by physical investigation methods studying tribology properties of fabric liner, however numerical simulation methods can better compensate these shortcomings, making a more effective, more convenient and more environment friendly research.The research object of this paper is broken twill fabric liner aimed at using numerical simulation methods to investigate the wear property of fabric liner. Voxel-based fabric liner finite element model was established using the preprocessor of finite element analysis software ANSYS, which makes apparent improvement for liner model. In order to obtain the Archard wear constitutive equations of PTFE and Kevlar, CETR UMT-3friction and wear tester was utilized to do filament wear test of PTFE and Kevlar fibers respectively, and then 1st Opt and Origin software was used to process data. Meanwhile,test data were calculated by applying the regression method verifying the accuracy of the fitting results.ABAQUS FRIC user subroutine was written with wear model of PTFE and Kevlar fibers, and obtaining the whole wear model of fabric liner. On the basic of the above,sliding wear process of fabric liner/steel was simulated by the finite element software ABAQUS, meanwhile numerical simulation curve of wear depth and wear time was obtained. Then wear property of fabric liner was researched deeply. The whole life wear test of PTFE /Kevlar fabric liner were conducted in the work condition of high speed and light load using homemade high-speed swing self-lubricating liner performance tester,obtaining the testing curve of wear depth and wear time. Numerical simulation resultswere compared with the test results aiming at discovering the discrimination between the two, and the error is in allowed range, which not only validating the correctness of wear model of broken twill fabric liner but also laying the foundation for tribology investigation of other structures.