Friction and wear of additive manufactured polymers in dry contact

The use of additive manufacturing (AM) is widely advancing the scope of rapid prototyping and manufacturing in tribological applications and material science research. However, there is still limited research focused on investigating the frictional and wear performance of AM polymers, especially of Polyjet manufactured parts. This work focuses on the effect of varying the contact load on the friction and wear mechanisms of additively manufactured acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (3D ABS) and Verogray polymers fabricated using Polyjet technology. Loads of 1, 5 and 10 N were applied under dry sliding contact with a 52100 steel counterface at room temperature. Dependence of friction and wear on the surface orientation to the sliding direction is noted. The results demonstrate that at 1 N load, the friction coefficient is primarily dependent on the orientation of the surface to the sliding direction. However, at higher loads of 5 N and 10 N, this dependency is shown to be a function of the bulk material properties rather than the surface roughness. Further correlation between the surface morphology and wear rate is shown to be dependent on the bulk material properties and the applied load. The results from this study provide alternate application uses for Polyjet materials in metal-polymer tribo-contacts for improved friction and wear performance.