ABSTRACT
There are many ways of characterizing the friction and wear properties of tribological systems. The most common approach is to obtain appropriate values of frictional traction and rates of wear (in various formats, such as weight loss over sliding distance, volumetric loss over sliding distance, and so on) under specific conditions of tribological contact and environment. Although this method of characterization is precise for a pair of materials in tribological contact, it is limited in that it provides only information pertaining to the particular situation (such as the relative sliding speed and the contact pressure under which the tribological data are obtained). Information on changes to the tribological characteristics, such as the dominant wear mechanisms, when the contact or environmental conditions are varied, is not provided to the user. Such knowledge could be crucial to engineers'and designers alike. This lack could be compensated if the mapping approach is used.
