Effect of abrasive properties on the high-stress three-body abrasion of steels and hard metals

Especially in tunneling, the abrasiveness of rock is an important property, which can easily be determined by several methods developed for the purpose. With this in mind, it is rather surprising that the effects of different rock types on the wear mechanisms of engineering materials have not been too widely studied. In this paper, high stress three-body abrasive tests were conducted with four different abrasives with a relatively large (2-10 mm) particle size. As test materials, three different steels and three hard metals were used. The tests clearly showed that material type has an influence on how different abrasive and material properties affect the abrasive wear mechanisms and severity. For example with hard metals, me most important property of the abrasives is their crushability, as only small abrasive particles are able to properly attack the binder phase and cause high wear rates. On the other hand, it seems that the abrasiveness of rock is not the dominating property determining the severity of wear in the current test conditions for any of the tested materials. In fact, with steels no single abrasive property could be shown to clearly govern the abrasive wear processes. In any case, when using the determined abrasiveness values in wear estimations, the contact conditions in the method used for determining the abrasiveness values should be as similar as possible with the end application.