Experimental Assessment of Materials for Indirect Surface Texturing

摘要

Tribological behavior of surfaces can be enhanced significantly by the presence of very small scale (nanometric) surface textures. Indirect surface texturing is a recently developed process by which a surface texture can be produced through differential wear of the constituents of a bimaterial surface. To enable rapid and low-cost investigation of material pairs that may be used to form such bimaterial surfaces, a specimen and test procedure have been developed and are described in this paper. The specimen allows the extremes of behavior that can be experienced during use of an indirectly textured surface to be assessed. The procedure is demonstrated using steel and titanium carbide (TiC) bimaterial samples that are found to develop a surface step, corresponding to texture development on a treated surface, even following extreme wear by grinding.