Laboratory simulation of wear during hot extrusion of aluminium

Abstract

The study of the wear of a tribological pair of soft and heated metals in contact with a hard counter body is very demanding. The main difficulty with such studies is the deficiency of reliable experimental data due to the problem of maintaining the prescribed contact pressures for a long time between hot softer metal and hard body. A very important tribological system that belongs to this group of demanding systems is present in aluminium hot extrusion, where temperatures of billets lie in the range 450–500 °C, the contact pressure is up to 30 MPa and the sliding velocity in the range 5–100 m/min. In order to gain a deeper insight into the wear behavior in aluminium hot extrusion, laboratory wear tests on nitrided samples at various contact pressures were carried out. The description of experimental setup and main characteristics of the degradation progress of the tested surfaces are presented.