Thin layer activation for measuring fretting wear and material transfer in iron alloys

An important difference between fretting wear and macroscopic wear processes lies in the amounts of wear volume. Because of the small relative displacements in fretting wear the wear volumes are much smaller than in (classical) macroscopic wear processes. Classical wear measuring techniques such as weighing and 2D-profilometry often fail to determine the fretting wear volumes. Their sensitivity as well as their accuracy are inadequate. 3D-profilometry partially solves this problem but the obtained wear results do not take eventual material transfer between the test specimens into account. In this work thin layer activation (TLA) is presented as a potentially powerful tool for quantitative fretting studies, especially in relation to material transfer. In contrast with the other mentioned wear measuring technique TLA allows measurements of very small amounts of wear as well as material transfer between the test specimens. Preliminary results are reported for steel specimens. A surface zone of 7 mm² of one test specimen, in which the wearing zone during the fretting experiment is situated, is irradiated with protons from a cyclotron. As a result of a nuclear reaction the iron in the irradiated test specimen forms radionuclides, mainly cobalt-56, in a surface layer of 260 μm depth. The amount of cobalt-56 as compared to iron is negligible so that the physical and chemical properties of the irradiated zone remain unaffected. Measuring the gamma rays of cobalt-56 in the wear debris gives quantitative information about the wear volume and measuring the mating surface gives information on the transfer volume.