Abrasion of aluminium alloy: effect of subsurface hardness and scratch interaction simulation

When transporting granular material, it has been shown that damage of used truck’s buckets is produced, and the correlation between hardness and abrasive wear resistance is not clear. In this paper, damage of a 5xxx aluminium alloy sheet used for truck buckets has been investigated. Different wear mechanisms have been observed: they show the coexistence of severe and mild abrasive wear. A scratch test is used to simulate this damage. By comparing experiments and the theoretical model, a better correlation between resistance to abrasive wear and subsurface hardness after damage is shown. The main wear mechanisms observed are ploughing and wedge forming for the two kinds of aluminium alloy. To simulate the repetitive loading of granular materials, juxtaposed scratches have been made using a scratch tester. Different behaviour of the deformed material at the sides of scratches has been found, and two wear mechanisms have been identified: cutting for the 7xxx and ploughing and wedge forming for the 5xxx aluminium alloy. Microscopic analysis has shown that, abrasive wear mechanisms are influenced by interactions phenomenon between wedges of different scratches.