Time-dependence and exposure-dependence of material removal rates in fretting

Fretting generally results in either material removal or fatigue, or a combination of both. Although the term is rarely used now, in the early literature addressing this subject, fretting that resulted in material removal was sometimes termed “fretting corrosion” on account of the characteristic oxide debris that emanated from such contacts, with this description itself encapsulating the understanding that the material removal has both a mechanical and a chemical nature. When the mechanical aspects of material removal in fretting dominate in the interpretation of the results, wear rates tend to be presented in terms of volume loss for a given exposure to wear (often measured by number of fretting cycles, total distance of sliding or energy dissipated). However, it is well understood that, in fretting, some aspects related to the formation of oxide-based debris are time-dependent (such as transport of species into and out of the contact and chemical reactions which take place at the contact surface) and this raises issues as to how to best present rate data associated with material removal. In this paper, recommendations are made as to how to be present volume loss data in fretting in a way that assists in the development of understanding of the rate-determining processes in material removal in fretting

Fretting wear behaviour of MoS2 dry film lubricant

Dry film lubricants (DFL) are used as palliative coatings to prevent fretting wear. In this work fretting tests are carried out on coated Ti6Al4V cylinders on coated flat samples under dry sliding conditions, using an amplitude of 300 µm, 2.5 Hz frequency and 575 N normal loads. During the tests the coefficient of friction (CoF) was monitored, with tests being terminated when the coefficient of friction reached 0.7. Wear scars were analysed by profilometry and SEM to elucidate wear mechanisms. Results show that CoF initially increases rapidly to 0.4, this is then followed by a plateau region that finishes in a sudden step decrease in CoF following which CoF rises steadily. This behaviour is shown to be characteristic and interrupted tests are presented to allow elucidation of the wear scar at different stages in the lifetime and thus aid an understanding of the mechanisms of degradation which control the tribological behaviour

Contact size and debris ejection in fretting: The inappropriate use of Archard-type analysis of wear data and the development of alternative wear equations for commonly employed non-conforming specimen pair geometries

It has been long understood that fretting differs from sliding wear in that the relative displacement between the bodies is generally smaller than the size of the contact between them, with debris ejection from the contact thus playing an important role in the behaviour of the contact in fretting. Whilst these ideas were clearly articulated more than 30 years ago via Godet's third-body approach and Berthier's concept of the tribology circuit, calculation of wear rates in fretting have continued to employ Archard's wear equation (or approaches directly derived from it), despite this approach assuming that the rate of wear is controlled by the rate of generation of wear debris (as opposed to the rate of its ejection from the contact). It has been shown recently that when debris ejection is the rate-determining-process in fretting, the instantaneous rate of wear is inversely proportional to a characteristic dimension of the wear scar. When non-conforming specimen pair geometries (such as cylinder-on-flat) are employed in fretting testing, the wear scar size increases as wear proceeds, and thus the instantaneous rate of wear decreases. In this paper, wear equations have been derived for three commonly employed non-conforming pair specimen geometries, which all take the form ( is the wear scar volume, is the radius of the non-plane specimen(s) in the pair and is the frictional energy dissipated) where varies between 0.67 and 0.8 depending upon the geometry and assumptions made regarding the governing equation. It is argued that the assumptions on which the analysis is based are most valid for the cylinder-on-flat contact configuration with fretting perpendicular to the cylinder axis where the length of the line contact is large compared to the wear scar width. It is demonstrated that, despite the often apparently good fit of experimental data to an Archard-type equation, it is not appropriate to employ such Archard-type approaches to the analysis of fretting data in situations where debris ejection is the rate-determining-process. The equations derived in this paper relating wear scar size to some measure of the duration of the test should be used for such analysis instead of the linear relationships generally employed in previous work

Understanding cycle tourism experiences at the Tour Down Under

Sport tourism experiences are subjective and emotional, laden with symbolic meaning. This study explores the experiences of participants who adopted the multiple roles of both an active participant and event spectator, within the parameters of one chosen sporting event. A professional cycling race event, the Tour Down Under in South Australia was chosen for this investigation, and 20 face-to-face individual interviews were conducted with cycle tourists. The three main themes emerging from the data were the interaction of people and temporary spaces on a sport tourism ‘stage’; the co-creation of authentic personal experiences and meanings; and identity reinforcement and the development of a sense of belonging. Consequently, a model for understanding sport event tourism experiences is proposed. The findings suggest that providing tourists with authentic and memorable experiences lies at the heart of what constitutes sport tourism. Whilst the results demonstrate that cycling events provide the individual with a sense of belonging or membership to a wider social group, they also illustrate that there is a continued need for more focused and nuanced approaches towards understanding sport tourism experiences that reflect the ever-increasing diversity and complexity of the interaction between sport, events and tourism

Performance based modifications of random forest to perform automated defect detection for fluorescent penetrant inspection

The established Machine Learning algorithm Random Forest (RF) has previously been shown to be effective at performing automated defect detection for test pieces which have been processed using fluorescent penetrant inspection (FPI). The work presented here investigates three methods (two previously proposed in other fields, one novel method) of modifying the FPI RF based on the individual performance of decision trees within the RF. Evaluating based on the 2 Score, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall which places a larger weighting on recall, it is possible to reduce the RF in size by up to 50%, improving speed and memory requirements, whilst still gain equivalent results to a full RF. Introducing a performance based weighting or retraining decision trees which fall below a certain performance level however, offers no improvement on results for the increased computation time required to implement

Aerosol-cloud interactions in mixed-phase convective clouds - Part 1: Aerosol perturbations

Changes induced by perturbed aerosol conditions in moderately deep mixed-phase convective clouds (cloud top height 5 km) developing along sea-breeze convergence lines are investigated with high-resolution numerical model simulations. The simulations utilise the newly developed Cloud-AeroSol Interacting Microphysics (CASIM) module for the Unified Model (UM), which allows for the representation of the two-way interaction between cloud and aerosol fields. Simulations are evaluated against observations collected during the COnvective Precipitation Experiment (COPE) field campaign over the southwestern peninsula of the UK in 2013. The simulations compare favourably with observed thermodynamic profiles, cloud base cloud droplet number concentrations (CDNC), cloud depth, and radar reflectivity statistics. Including the modification of aerosol fields by cloud microphysical processes improves the correspondence with observed CDNC values and spatial variability, but reduces the agreement with observations for average cloud size and cloud top height. Accumulated precipitation is suppressed for higher-aerosol conditions before clouds become organised along the sea-breeze convergence lines. Changes in precipitation are smaller in simulations with aerosol processing. The precipitation suppression is due to less efficient precipitation production by warm-phase microphysics, consistent with parcel model predictions. In contrast, after convective cells organise along the sea-breeze convergence zone, accumulated precipitation increases with aerosol concentrations. Condensate production increases with the aerosol concentrations due to higher vertical velocities in the convective cores and higher cloud top heights. However, for the highest-aerosol scenarios, no further increase in the condensate production occurs, as clouds grow into an upper-level stable layer. In these cases, the reduced precipitation efficiency (PE) dominates the precipitation response and no further precipitation enhancement occurs. Previous studies of deep convective clouds have related larger vertical velocities under high-aerosol conditions to enhanced latent heating from freezing. In the presented simulations changes in latent heating above the 0°C are negligible, but latent heating from condensation increases with aerosol concentrations. It is hypothesised that this increase is related to changes in the cloud field structure reducing the mixing of environmental air into the convective core. The precipitation response of the deeper mixed-phase clouds along well-established convergence lines can be the opposite of predictions from parcel models. This occurs when clouds interact with a pre-existing thermodynamic environment and cloud field structural changes occur that are not captured by simple parcel model approaches

Adhesive transfer operates during galling

In order to reduce cobalt within the primary circuit of pressurised water reactors (PWR’s), wear-resistant steels are being researched and developed. In particular interest is the understanding of galling mechanisms, an adhesive wear mechanism which is particularly prevalent in PWR valves. Here we show that large shear stresses and adhesive transfer occur during galling by exploiting the 2 wt.% manganese difference between 304L and 316L stainless steels, even at relatively low compressive stresses of 50MPa. Through these findings, the galling mechanisms of stainless steels can be better understood, which may help with the development of galling resistant stainless steels