Wear of polymer composites

Abstract The use of polymers and polymer composites in various tribological situations has become state of the art. Nevertheless, new developments are still under way to explore new fields of application for these materials and to tailor their properties for more extreme loading conditions. Some of these developments can be followed when searching through the 56 references given at the end of this review. The present overview describes, in particular, some of the authors' approaches in designing polymeric composites in order to operate under low friction and low wear against steel counterparts. Special emphasis is focused on thermoplastics and thermosets reinforced with special fillers (including nanoparticles). An attempt is made to predict their wear properties and to carry out systematic parameters studies by the use of artificial neural networks. Further information will be given on the fibre orientation dependence of wear of continuous carbon fibre-polymer matrix composites, and on attempts to predict their load-bearing capacity and related wear mechanisms by the use of finite elements. In addition, some new steps towards the development of functionally graded tribomaterials are illustrated.