Abrasive Wear

Abrasive wear testing attempts to simulate the wear at a bearing Cage-Land interface under severe abrasive conditions. Abrasive wear occurs when the bearing surfaces are exposed to abrasives that are suspended in the lubricating oil and are not filtered out through the normal filtration process either through inadequate filter design, failure in the filter itself, or through some other component failure in the lubrication path.

The cage land abrasive wear test performed for this effort has the test cylinder rotating against a stationary silver plated block specimen. The cylinder represents a bearing land, the block specimen represents a silver plated cage. A controlled amount of test debris is suspended in the lubricant that is delivered to the contact. Five cylinder materials were run for a total of 120 minutes each in a series of four 30 minutes tests. Each 120 minutes series was repeated 3 times. After each 30 minute test, the cylinder is weighed with an electronic balance and weight loss is used to quantify the amount of material lost due to abrasive wear.