Wear mechanisms on metal seal pairs surfaces in three-body abrasive environments: removal of asperity peaks

Surface roughness characteristics are considered to be important in influencing wear performance, with asperity peaks being among the more influential. Changes in the asperity peaks removal mechanism were explored at the microscopic level through friction wear experiments, revealing the reasons for changes in the macroscopic wear amount. The asperity peaks show different forms of removal under metal surface with different roughness characteristics. At low roughness it is mainly removed as a whole and at high roughness it is mainly removed partially. In addition, the ranges of roughness parameters Ra and Rpk, which have excellent wear performance, were determined. The research in this paper can provide assistance in designing the processing of metal surfaces to reduce wear loss.