Abstract
Coupling effects of fretting wear and cyclic stress could result in significant fatigue strength degradation, thus potentially causing unanticipated catastrophic fractures. The underlying mechanism of microstructural evolutions caused by fretting wear is ambiguous, which obstructs the understanding of fretting fatigue issues, and is unable to guarantee the reliability of structures for long-term operation. Here, fretting wear studies were performed to understand the microstructural evolution and oxidation behavior of an α/β titanium alloy up to 108 cycles. Contact surface degradation is mainly caused by surface oxidation and the generation of wear debris during fretting wear within the slip zone. The grain size in the topmost nanostructured layer could be refined to ∼40 nm. The grain refinement process involves the initial grain rotation, the formation of low angle grain boundary (LAGB; 2°–5°), the in-situ increments of the misorientation angle, and the final subdivision, which have been unraveled to feature the evolution in dislocation morphologies from slip lines to tangles and arrays. The formation of hetero microstructures regarding the nonequilibrium high angle grain boundary (HAGB) and dislocation arrays gives rise to more oxygen diffusion pathways in the topmost nanostructured layer, thus resulting in the formation of cracking interface to separate the oxidation zone and the adjoining nanostructured domain driven by tribological fatigue stress. Eventually, it facilitates surface degradation and the formation of catastrophic fractures.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11802145 and 12002226). Hanqing LIU acknowledges the support of JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (No. P20737) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and 2021 Open Project of Failure Mechanics and Engineering Disaster Prevention, Key Lab of Sichuan Province (No. FMEDP202106), China.
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Hanqing LIU. He received his B.S. degree in theoretical and applied mechanics from Lanzhou University, China, in 2013, M.E. degree in solid mechanics in 2016 and Ph.D. in aerospace mechanics and engineering in 2019 from Sichuan University, China. He worked as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyushu University, Japan, until November 2022. He joined the University of Oxford, UK, in January 2023 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. His research interests include mechanical behavior and microstructural characterization of materials that experienced harsh environments.
Qingyuan WANG. He received his Ph.D. from Ecole Centrale Paris, France, in 1998. He worked at Sichuan University, China, as a professor since 2003. His research interests include very high cycle fatigue; mechanical behavior of materials and structures; experimental mechanics of solid.
Lang LI. He received his Ph.D. from Sichuan University, China, in 2018, working as an associate researcher in the Department of Mechanics of Sichuan University now. His research interests include experimental mechanics of solid, and microstructural behavior of in-service materials.
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Liu, H., Shao, X., Tan, K. et al. Microstructural evolution and oxidation in α/β titanium alloy under fretting fatigue loading. Friction 11, 1906–1921 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-022-0729-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-022-0729-z