WEAR SIMULATION OF THE POLYMER BASED COMPOSITE SLIDING BEARINGS BY MEANS OF ANSYS

Polymer based composite sliding bearings are increasingly applied in many industries, due to their economic (usually low cost of production) and technical (good tribological properties) benefits. In order to predict their life cycle, it is necessary to perform numerous experiments and evaluate their wear rate. This is generally quite expensive and time consuming. By applying only one series of the experiments and determining Archard's wear coefficient, and embedding it into the code of the Ansys software, it is possible to simulate the wear, and thus save the time and the financial resources. This paper explains the procedure of the wear simulation in case of known Archard's coefficient, for sliding bearings made of PTFE polyamide composite material in contact with shaft of steel. The output of the simulation is the contact pressure in relation of time and the amount of worn volume for 3 revolutions of the shaft.