A computational approach to Fretting Wear prediction of Steel Gaskets under Thermo-Mechanical load using Archards wear model

IC Engine is the heart of an automobile. The failure in any component of the engine will directly affect the performance of the vehicle. The gaskets are among the many vital parts of an IC engine that are essential in ensuring appropriate sealing to prevent gas and liquid leakage and maintain optimal engine efficiency. Engines use a variety of gasket types to accommodate various sealing requirements. Among them the exhaust manifold gaskets is one of the critical gasket elements in IC engines which seals between Cylinder head and extremely hot Exhaust Manifold, this prevents the leakage of hot exhaust gasses produced during combustion. The gaskets are crucial components because they endure extremely high mechanical loads from the exhaust manifold sliding and banana-shaped bending brought on by thermal expansion, as well as extremely high thermal loads from the high exhaust gas temperatures, which are around 1000°C. These gaskets are additionally subjected to extremely high bolt loads. As the gaskets are made of steel materials, due to the above Thermo-Mechanical loads, there are very high chances for wear out of the gaskets, which affects the performance of the engine. Study of wear phenomenon is very challenging particularly for the gaskets because of nonlinear behavior of geometries, material nonlinearities and in addition, the gaskets are made up of numerous layers with negligible thickness, which makes it further challenging. The wear in Automobile Engine components and particularly in gaskets is an area, which has not been studied extensively. Wear prediction is therefore a crucial part of engineering. This paper presents the development of a method to capture the wear phenomenon on the gaskets in a simulation environment by implementing the classical Archards wear model in a UMESHMMOTION Fortran subroutine code, simulated in the Finite Element Software ABAQUS/ Standard. To account for the effects of the material removal and changing geometry due to wear, the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian meshing technique of ABAQUS was used.