Surface Fatigue
The term “surface fatigue” covers the combination of wear mechanisms, operating within a surface layer of several micrometers in thickness, that are caused by tangential shear stresses at the material surface as well as by iterative impacts. The surface fatigue is characterized by crack formation along the grain boundaries or cleavage planes starting at the surface and progressing continuously to greater depth by subcritical crack growth. This wear mechanism is especially detrimental since the ultimate depth of the cracks cannot be estimated by looking at the surface of the material. Upon service, however, they can grow slowly to more than 100 μm extension becoming the rupture-initiating failure of the part by reaching the critical length as given by the Griffith Equation. Tool failure by surface fatigue is a characteristic for cycling compressive and tensile loading as observed by, e.g., intermittent cutting operations or by reverse sliding of seals. A similar effect may cause the pull-out of ceramic grinding grains if the particle interface to the binder is slowly and steadily subjected to cycling loads and debonds.
Subcritical crack growth by repeated impact may be supported by iterative thermal shock. In case of the grinding operation, for instance, the temperature during the milliseconds of cutting action may give rise to a strong temperature increase at both the cutting tip and the work material surface area in contact. Local stresses may develop due to the accordingly introduced thermal gradients, due to an isotropy effects, or due to differences in thermal expansion of the various compounds. Since crack growth is the basic mechanism of this wear effect, a high fracture toughness, a high thermal conductivity, and the low thermal expansion coefficient of the ceramic material is requested.
Adhesion
Adhesion comprises the chemical interaction between the wear materials. Depending on the affinity between cutting tool and work material, a local joining or even welding of both materials may occur. The binding forces may become so high that chips may be pulled out or chipped off from the work material, e.g., the metal debris of the work material may adhere at the ceramic cutting tool. This effect is also known as material transfer and is responsible for the fact that the cutting tool is not in contact any more with the work material. Figure 1.6shows several models to explain the effect of adhesion. Besides clamping as a mechanical effect, diffusion of atoms and ions, electron transfer, or dielectric polarization effects are considered to be responsible for the development of chemical bonding.
Figure 1.6.
Possible reasons for adhesion (after Zum Gahr)
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Tribo-chemical Reactions
Tribo-ch(after Zum Gahr)emical reactions between wear couples, e.g., tool material and work material may occur if both materials are not in a thermodynamic equilibrium, especially at higher temperatures. In the contact area, a new reaction product is formed which is usually removed together with the chip or adheres at the cutting tool material. These reactions may also be caused by environmental materials like lubricants or atmospheric gases. The chemical wear becomes visible by very smooth and lustering surfaces or by deformation of built-up cutting edges. To avoid tribo-chemical reactions, appropriate tool material selections may be recommended as well as lower cutting powers to avoid the generating of high temperatures.
Combined Wear Mechanisms
Of course, the above-mentioned mechanisms do not occur separately but in combination with each other where they are not acting additively but multiplicatively. Environmental material like lubricants, gases, or tribo-chemical reaction products may infiltrate surface cracks opened by dynamic fatigue, possibly initiating new stress corrosion mechanisms and therefore enhancing the subcritical crack growth. Similarly, abrasion may be drastically accelerated if the surface of the material is partially dissolved by chemical attack or if the grain boundaries are weakened. Furthermore, surface fatigue may contribute to enhanced abrasion by weakening the grain boundary strength by a cycling load that facilitates the pull-out of single particles.
The combination of adhesion and tribo-chemical reaction causes even more severe wear problems.Figure 1.7 shows an example where both materials have adhesive contact at the apices of the surface roughness while including reactive environmental material in the adjacent concave surface areas. Chemical reactions may now result in the formation of a passivation layer on both surfaces preventing a further chemical attack. Together with the material removal by adhesive contact, however, this passivation layer may be destroyed whenever it is newly formed. Consequently, the concave structures are filled with debris acting as very small abrasive particles enlarging the concave structures by interactive microgrinding effects. This synergetic wear mechanisms result in a very fast pull-out of the protruding hard material grains.
Figure 1.7.
Synergetic effects of combined adhesion and tribo-chemical reaction (after Zum Gahr)
(a)
Adhesion
(b)
Formation of passivation layer
(c)
Formation of debris by adhesive pull-out
(d)
Removal of passivation layer by wear debris
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1.3. Fundamental properties and selection criteria
For ruling out wear resistant materials for special applications, the specific mechanical properties such as hardness, toughness, strength, thermal conductivity, oxidation resistance, and chemical inertness against the work material must be considered as functions of temperature in service. For this, hardness, thermal conductivity, oxidation resistance, and chemical inertness are considered intrinsic properties that can be assigned to a particular chemical compound; they follow the known rules of mixtures if another compound is added to form a composite material. Fracture toughness, fracture strength, and consequently also thermal shock resistance are basically influenced by the microstructure and can therefore be modified by certain optimization techniques. This chapter is devoted to the intrinsic properties whereas the improvement strategies will be addressed in the chapter: Reinforcing mechanisms.
Hardness
It has been shown already that, besides fracture toughness, hardness is the property determining the resistance against abrasive wear. Figure 1.8 shows the temperature dependence of hardness for some important ceramic materials in relation to diamond and cubic boron nitride (CBN). Due to its perfect covalent bonding, diamond is the hardest natural and synthetic material known. Theoretically, other compounds have been predicted by calculation of interatomic forces having a hardness superior to that of diamond. Compounds like C3N4 are, however, not stable under technically available pressures and are therefore only hypothetical candidates for hard materials but nevertheless investigated as coatings on silicon nitride substrates. Although diamond is a high-cost product, cutting tools made of polycrystalline diamond or grinding grits consisting of diamond particles are widely used for grinding, milling, and machining treatments of ceramics as well as metals. Because of its metastability under normal pressure, diamond has the disadvantage of transforming to the stable graphite phase at temperatures above 500-600 °C. Upon transformation from the cubic to the hexagonal modification with a weakly bonded layered structure, diamond undergoes a lattice softening which causes a dramatic decrease of hardness. A similar behavior is observed of cubic boron nitride which is also a high-pressure compound with the same structure like diamond. It also turns to hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) graphite structure and shows, therefore, the same decrease in hardness but at much lower temperatures. The material ranking at the third order is boron carbide, B4C, which does not undergo phase transformation. It is followed by silicon carbide, SiC, silicon nitride, Si3N4, and finally by a series of transition metal borides and carbides which have, however, only 20 to 25% of the hardness of diamond and 50% of the hardness of boron carbide. The first oxide ceramic of interest is boron suboxide (B6O) which is technically unimportant up to now followed by alumina (A12O3), and spinels (MgAl2O4) ranging at 2000 kg/mm2 and less (Figure 1.8). In comparison to these materials, zirconia (ZrO2) is rather soft with the hardness of 800 to 1100 kg/mm2 at room temperature and the strength further decreases upon heating. Zirconia, however, is a very important compound in oxide ceramic composites being responsible for a strong increase in fracture toughness as will be shown later. Another grinding and polishing material, silica (SiO2) starts with a hardness on the order of 600 kg/mm2 but shows a transient sudden increase in hardness at 573 °C to 1500 kg/mm2 due to the reversible transformation to a high temperature structure.