Acoustic Emission and Its Relationship with Friction and Wear for Sliding Contact

Further investigation of the relationships between friction and wear properties and the characteristics of acoustic emission was conducted in the case of dry and grease-lubricated sliding contact using a ball-on-cylinder testing apparatus. The effect of contamination simulated by the inclusion of glass bead particles was also explored. Experiments were performed at sliding speeds ranging from 0.09 m/s to 1.47 m/s, while maintaining a fixed load and duration. As a first observation and contrary to what could be expected, the higher speed did not contribute to the decrease in friction interpreted by a worsening of the starved regime that had a consequence of increasing wear. However, the results revealed a good correlation between the friction coefficient and acoustic emission (AE) rms voltage for dry sliding. Such a relationship may allow the prediction of a reasonable friction coefficient μ from an AE signal. It was also determined that the friction work correlated well with the corresponding integrated AE voltage over time, intRMS. The detection of the sliding speed threshold beyond which accelerated wear would occur was possible from the intRMS variation. Proportionality between the theoretically determined grease film thickness and the intRMS was observed.