Abrasive Wear Model for Continuous Fiber-Reinforced Materials

Abstract

Abstract A modification of Archard’s law is proposed to develop upper and lower bounds for the abrasive wear of continuous fiber-reinforced composite materials. Unlike the steady-state wear model in which different phases wear at the same rate, the proposed model is a quasi steady-state (or cyclic) wear model in which fiber and matrix do not always wear at the same rate. Higher wear rates are predicted for materials with weakly bonded interfaces due to an intermittent wear mechanism in which the less wear-resistant matrix is removed from the fiber until fiber breakage occurs. The wear rate increases until the fiber ends are exposed once more. Two modified rules of mixtures for the abrasive wear of composites are derived by examining two extreme cases of the proposed cyclic wear model. These modified rules of mixtures, incorporating the composite moduli, are compared to known data. They provide closer bounds to abrasive wear resistance of polymer composites than the simple linear and inverse rules of mixtures.