Dry sliding wear of diamond materials

In pin-on-disc tests, diamond composites, consisting of diamonds imbedded in a silicon matrix, were run against themselves in air at a sliding speed of 125 cm s^?1 and for loads up to 3.6 kgf. In addition, a few experiments involving sintered diamond compacts rubbing against a rotating metal ring in a ring-and-block configuration were conducted. For the diamond composite wear tests, wear was found to be proportional to load and sliding distance for P ? 3.0 kgf. For both the diamond composite and the diamond compact, the wear rates were very low and similar to those previously observed for single-crystal diamonds rubbed by diamond and metal.