Simulation of friction and wear in DLC/steel contacts for different loading histories and geometries: Ball-on-plate configuration and piston–cylinder-contacts

DLC-coatings are used in industry for wear protection of highly loaded tribological contacts. Because the transfer of the wear results from model experiments to realistic contact conditions is not yet possible, long lasting endurance-tests have to be performed. As part of the development of a predictive tool, a recently developed unified dissipative energy model has been applied to different loading histories and geometries, such as ball-on-plate and piston–cylinder-geometry. Predictions of the friction coefficient and the wear depth, which were obtained from a Global Incremental Wear Model (GIWM), are in good agreement to experiments and successfully validate the transferability of the model.