An advanced efficient model for adhesive wear in elastic–plastic spherical contact

A finite element (FE) model combining submodel technique is presented for the adhesive wear in elastic–plastic spherical contact. It consists of a global model, showing the potential location of fracture under combined normal and tangential loading, and a refined mesh submodel covering only the region near the potential fracture. This allows to describe the morphology of wear particle more accurately than that in a previously developed model by the authors. A range of normal loading is studied to show its effect on the shape and volume of wear particles. Two main regimes of mild and severe wear (along with a relatively narrow transition region between them) are found, which show almost linear and power-law dependency of wear rate on normal loading, respectively. Such behavior agrees with published experimental observations. However, the transition region is theoretically predicted here for the first time.