Experimental Study of Sliding Wear Behavior of the Casted Lead Bronze Journal Bearing Material 2019-01-0824

Lead (Pb) bronze material is used for the manufacturing of bearings. Lead provides less friction and wear-related properties to bronze. During working of the bearings the lead contained micro-chips mixes with the lubricant oil and makes its disposal difficult. Rotational speed and applied load are the two main parameters on which the working and amount of wear from the bearing depend. So it is important to find out an optimum set of speed and pressure on which a particular bearing should operate to minimize the wear and hence minimize the lead-contaminated lubricating oil. In the present work, Taguchi technique has been used to find out the optimum values of speed and pressure. To measure the specific wear rate (SWR) and coefficient of friction (COF) of the leaded bronze material, it is made to slide on a mild steel material and amount of wear and coefficient of friction has been recorded using a pin on disc machine using ASTM-G99 standards. Experimental tests were conducted at different sliding speed (3.01, 3.95, 4.52, 4.62, 4.72 m/s) and pressure (31, 62, 93, 124, 156 kPa) values. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images and Electron dispersion spectroscopy (EDS) analysis data were obtained for the wear area on the lead bronze to predict the wear nature and distribution of the elements in the lead bronze material. For the considered values of the speed and pressure, the leaded bronze material resulted in less SWR at (4.72 m/s, 31 kPa) and minimum COF at (4.52 m/s, 62 kPa) combination of speed and pressure. Confirmation tests were also performed to verify the optimizing results.