Modeling and Optimization of Friction and Wear Characteristics of Ti3Al2.5V Alloy Under Dry Sliding Condition

Modeling of dry sliding friction and wear behavior of Ti3Al2.5V alloy sliding against EN31 steel using a multi-tribotester has been presented. Mathematical model equations in the form of natural log transformation for wear rate (W_R), average coefficient of friction (μ_a), and a square root transformation for maximum contact temperature (T_m) considering the effect of tribological variables have been developed and validated by comparing them with the experimental results. The authors claim novelty with regard to modeling and optimization of friction and wear characteristics of Ti-3Al2.5V alloy. The results reveal that the magnitude of wear rate and maximum contact temperature increases with increase in sliding velocity and increasing normal load with few exceptions. Whereas average coefficient of friction first increases with increasing sliding velocity up to 2.51 m/s, and then decreases at highest sliding velocity. The load is found to have strongest influence on both wear rate and average coefficient of friction followed by sliding velocity, whereas sliding velocity has strongest influence on the maximum contact temperature followed by load. The perturbation plot results are also in accordance with the analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis. The theoretical and experimental results have an average error of 5.06%, 1.78%, and 1.42%, respectively, for wear rate, average coefficient of friction, and maximum contact temperature. Optimization resulted in a maximum desirability of 0.508 at a load of 60 N and a sliding velocity of 1.5 m/s. For these values, the predicted minimum wear rate is 0.0001144 g/m, the coefficient of friction is 0.3181, and the tool-tip temperature is 59.03 °C.