THE EFFECT OF HARDNESS ON THE FRETTING FATIGUE OF ALLOY STEELS

The fretting fatigue behaviour of several alloy steels is reported in this paper. Fretting fatigue experiments were conducted on flat fretting junctions in axial tension at a stress ratio of 0.1. In all cases the same materials were fretted against each other. The fretting fatigue strength at a slip amplitude of 45 μ is rather insensitive to the hardness of the materials. The fretting fatigue strength at the slip amplitude of 10 μ increases with increase in hardness. As the slip amplitude increases the fretting fatigue life of 3SCrMo steel decreases, the depth of wear scars increases and the wear damage becomes more severe. The reason for similarity of fretting fatigue to the fatigue of notched specimens is that the effect of wear scars is similar to that of notches.