Running-in in fretting, transition from near-stable friction regime to gross sliding

It has been shown that quenched and tempered steel in gross-sliding fretting conditions, with tens of microns of slip amplitude, leads to fretting induced cracking and high and non-Coulomb friction. At low tangential load levels, there was only insignificant cracking. However, the running condition tends to change from stick to gross-sliding with a slip amplitude of a few micrometres. In this study, novel two-phase fretting experiments were done where quenched and tempered steel contact is run first at low loads that are initially in stick (running-in phase), followed by a gross-sliding phase with a slip amplitude of 35μm. The results show that gross-sliding phase friction was reduced and the fretting induced cracks were shorter when the running-in phase was done at high enough load level and lasted more than 10⁶ load cycles. At the highest running-in load levels, the resulting crack lengths were approximately halved in comparison to experiments without running-in, and it was possible to achieve nearly ideal Coulomb friction in the gross-sliding phase when the running-in duration was 10.2×10⁶ load cycles. It is concluded that it is possible to control fretting-induced friction and cracking by carefully controlled running-in.