Contact Wear

Mechanical contact interactions can cause surface wear (erosion) due to various microscale mechanisms, such as in abrasion and fretting. Such mechanisms are modeled in a continuum by phenomenological approaches that characterize the evolution of wear.

Wear modeling:

  • uses variants of Archard's wear model to predict the rate of surface erosion based on wear properties assigned to surfaces and contact conditions;
  • accounts for local surface wear distances in contact penetration calculations but not in underlying element calculations;
  • is supported for both general contact and contact pairs in Abaqus/Standard and for general contact in Abaqus/Explicit;
  • can be used together with ALE adaptive meshing in Abaqus/Explicit (see About ALE Adaptive Meshing and );
  • can be used together with step cycling in Abaqus/Standard
  • supports wear accumulation in general steps with exceptions for steady-state transport and locations with material transport boundary conditions; and
  • supports only solid elements for Abaqus/Explicit.

This page discusses:

See Also
In Other Guides
*WEAR SURFACE PROPERTIES
*SURFACE PROPERTY
*SURFACE PROPERTY ASSIGNMENT
*STEP CYCLING
*STEP CYCLING CONTROL
*ADAPTIVE MESH

Products Abaqus/Standard Abaqus/Explicit Abaqus/CAE