Abrasive wear of nanoscale single crystal silicon

JP Sun and L Fang and J Han and Y Han and HW Chen and K Sun, WEAR, 307, 119-126 (2013).

DOI: 10.1016/j.wear.2013.08.010

Nanoscale three-body and two-body abrasive wear on the monocrystalline silicon are investigated using a large-scale molecular dynamics approach. A nanoscale model of three-body abrasion is proposed to evaluate the movement pattern of a sphere particle. It is concluded that the rolling movement of a particle is observed without sliding in the present nanoscale computation process. It is found that there exists a large elastic recovery which prevents the sphere particle from sliding. A modified e/h criterion is proposed to predict the movement pattern of a particle. The result confirms the crucial effect of the elastic recovery on movement pattern. The plowing is also observed as a main wear pattern in three-body abrasion at the nanoscale, whereas the wear mechanism will transform from plowing into cutting at a large indentation depth for two-body abrasion. The cutting tendency is increased with increasing indentation depth. In both the three-body and two-body abrasion, friction force is directly proportional to normal force which governs the friction rule. A turning point is found lied on frictional line related to normal force, which indicates a transition of wear mechanism in two-body abrasion. It is also examined that three-body abrasion is able to cause more massive phase transformation than two- body abrasion although it is with shallower groove in three-body abrasion than in two-body abrasion. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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