Archard wear law

The Archard wear equation was developed by Archard based upon an earlier theory developed by
Holm. It is also referred to as the Archard-Holm and Holm-Archard law. Holm published his
model based upon his theory of atoms being removed from the surface of a material in 1946.
Archard improved upon the theory by using asperities (clusters of atoms) instead of individual
atoms as the basis for his model in 1953.
The Archard wear law or some equivalent of it is used in most fretting models and to fit most
experimental data. Although wear experts will tell you that the law does not apply in many
cases, it is commonly used because it works fairly well a lot of the time and there is no perfect
wear law.
The most common form of the equation is shown below. Here W is the wear volume lost, K is
the wear coefficient, H is the hardness, F is the normal force, and S is the sliding distance.

The equation can also be reworked to measure wear depth or wear rate. The next equation shows
the equation for wear depth which comes from dividing each side of the equation by area. Here
P is the pressure and is the wear depth.

To calculate the wear rate the derivative with respect to time is taken. This can be simplified in
most cases by assuming that the normal load is constant with respect to time. Here a dot above a
term means a time derivative has been taken so is the velocity.