1. Objectives and implementation conditions

1.1 Test objectives

First of all, it should be stressed that the implementation of a friction or wear test can have various objectives:

• or compare the performance of various lubricants or lubrication methods; for this purpose, a simple relative ranking is necessary;

• or provide a friction or wear law enabling digital simulation of the forming process, for example to enable the design of a new operation (forging, stamping, rolling, drawing, etc.) and reduce the need for development tests; with this in mind, the more representative the friction or wear law, the more effective the design will be.

It is currently impossible to predict friction and wear a priori in a given...