Profilometric Measurement of Wear Scar Volume After Abrasive Resistance Test

Abrasive wear is responsible for a substantial part of wear-related failures. Dry sand/rubber wheel tests are typically applied to analyze the abrasive wear resistances of materials. Volumetric wear, preferable to mass loss, is typically determined indirectly using the gravimetric method. It is not possible to obtain information on the amount of wear in various places of wear scar with this technique. There are other deficiencies in the gravimetric method of wear measurement. The profilometric technique based on the measurement of the areal (3D) topography of a surface allows us to directly measure the volume of a wear scar, including information on wear amount at several places of a wear track. The procedure to determine the wear volume on the basis of the measurement of the 3D surface texture is described. To shorten the time for 3D surface topography measurement, volumetric loss can be precisely evaluated based on the measurement of several profiles along the sliding direction. The proposed number of profiles was six—the relative errors were less than 5%.