Experimental Investigation of the Friction and Wear Behaviour with an Adapted Ball-On-Prism Test Setup

In this study, the friction and wear behaviour of a brass-steel and a copper-steel pairing is investigated and compared. For this purpose, an adapted ball-on-prism test configuration is used. With the proposed test setup, the evolution of the coefficient of friction and the surface temperature, as well as, the linear wear rate and the weight loss are obtained. The influence of the normal load, the sliding velocity, and the number of contact points are examined. The results for the brass-steel pairing reveal no dependency of the coefficient of friction on the normal load and the number of contact points, whereas for higher sliding velocities, a slight increase of the coefficient of friction can be observed. The linear wear rate increases with the normal load, the sliding velocity, and the number of contact points. The coefficient of friction for the copper-steel pairing decreases with an increase of the normal load, increases for higher sliding velocities, and shows no obvious dependency on the number of contact points. The linear wear rate decreases with increasing sliding velocity and increases with the number of contact points.