Abstract
Wear is affected by numerous factors-contact load, sliding velocity and distance, friction coefficient, material properties and environmental conditions. Among these wear factors, surface hardness is one of very important factors to determine wear. But surface hardness is varied by work hardening during repeated sliding contact. In this reason wear rate is increased or decreased with varying surface hardness, and transition of wear mechanism is happened. In this study, the surface hardening by accumulating residual stress was analyzed by considering the repeated sliding Hertzian contact model. The results showed that surface hardness was increased with increasing contact load, friction coefficient and contact number. And the depth of hardening layer, plastic layer and elastic layer depended upon contact load and number, but they didn't depend upon friction coefficient. The predicted surface hardness was about 1.5-1.8 times as hard as the material.