Method for determining wear in steel-bronze rolling-sliding contacts relating to worm gears

In highly loaded steel-bronze rolling-sliding contacts under mixed lubrication conditions, abrasive wear often occurs and limits the service life. Up to now, in applications of thermal elastohydrodynamically lubricated (TEHL) contacts with hard/soft pairing such as worm gear drives, extensive, costly, and time-consuming component wear tests need to be carried out to determine the wear performance for each tribological system. High-carrying capacity lubricants and bronze alloys with high wear resistance are expensive, so an efficient screening test method for wear performance will help to save development and product costs. For this reason, this paper covers a new and efficient method based on a twin-disk test rig to experimentally determine the wear of steel-bronze rolling-sliding contacts. The wear determination method presented is suitable for efficiently determining wear rates and shows comparable wear behavior to similar rolling-sliding contacts in the literature. The introduced method also allows conclusions about the wear performance of tribological systems from the twin disk to the worm tooth contact with a remarkably shorter test run time.