Experimental Study on the Effect of Microstructure on Dry Sliding Wear Behavior of Titanium Alloy Using Taguchi Experimental Design

The present article depicts the influence of independent control factors such as microstructural variation, normal load, sliding velocity, and test duration on the dry sliding wear behavior of titanium alloy at room temperature using a statistical approach. Different heat treatments were carried out in a controlled manner to produce various microstructural features (i.e., lamellar, bimodal, and equiaxed) in this alloy. A lamellar microstructure is found to be harder than bimodal microstructure followed by an equiaxed microstructure in this alloy. Dry sliding wear tests were carried out using a multiple tribotester following a well-planned experimental schedule based on Taguchi's orthogonal arrays. The dry sliding wear behavior of this alloy consisting of various microstructural features is related to their hardness values. The results indicated that a lamellar microstructure has the lowest sliding wear resistance followed by bimodal and equiaxed microstructures. Using signal-to-noise ratios and analysis of variance (ANOVA), an optimal combination of control factors that minimize the dry sliding wear in this alloy were determined. Among all four control factors, normal load is the most significant control factor influencing the dry sliding wear behavior of the investigated titanium alloy, followed by microstructural variation, sliding velocity, and test duration. Normal load has a greater static influence of 39.53%, microstructural variation has an influence of 31.55%, sliding velocity has an influence of 21.6%, and test duration has an influence of 5.7% on the dry sliding wear of this alloy. Two wear mechanisms were identified: oxidative wear occurs at the lowest sliding velocity and delamination wear occurs at the highest sliding velocity. Optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and Rockwell hardness measurements were used to characterize the microstructures in order to correlate the results obtained.