SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER 935 Thermal behaviours of metallic materials under very high-speed sliding

Abstract: Heat produced by friction influences tribological properties greatly, especially under high-speed dry sliding, where the temperature is high enough to cause obvious changes in the microstructure of the materials. Based on the above suggestions, researches were carried out on several metallic pairs with different thermal properties. The experiments were carried out under the condition of sliding speed ranging from 30 to 60m/s, contacting pressure ranging from 0.13 to 1.33MPa, and the surrounding temperatures ranging from room temperature to 500 ◦C. The testing results have indicated that thermal behaviours influence tribological characteristics in a very complicatedway. It seems that tribological properties behaviours are different among differ-ent metallic pairs under high-speed dry sliding, which seems to be related to heat conductivity; tribological properties are also sensitive to surface temperature. All measures to improve the fric-tion heat conduction help to increase the tribological properties. Surrounding temperature also influences the tribological property greatly; it seems that the existence of oxygen is beneficial to obtain better tribological properties