Efeito do controle da topografia na eficiência de contatos lubrificados: avaliação experimental

Abstract

The use of surface texturing to improve performance of lubricated contacts is increasingly used. The major barrier to applying this topographical change industrially is the difficulty to combine productivity, low cost and flexibility in texturing different patterns and geometries of surfaces to be textured. The objective of this work is to investigate experimentally the effect of topography control on the efficiency of lubricated contacts, using Maskless Electrochemical Texturing Method (MECT), which is both a low cost and high speed texturing process. Once established the texturing parameters for the MECT method for ABNT 1045 steel, block-on-ring tests were carried out to compare the influence of topographic change, comparing the efficiency of full and partial surface texturing, position and orientation of the texture with respect to surfaces without topographical change for two lubrication regimes, boundary and mixed. Under mixed lubrication regime, surface texturing did not show benefit compared to the surface without change, due to the increased roughness resulting from MECT texturing method. In the boundary regime, texturing reduced the friction coefficient, wear and temperature of the fluid. Partial texturing proved to be more efficient than full texturing, with textures positioned in the outlet region with better performance, both in respect to coefficient of friction and wear rate.