Archard Wear Law

The Archard Wear Law is the simplest functional form (linear) that can be construed for the wear of mating surfaces  

Manufacturers will have the wear factor, K tabulated for comparison between materials. The Archard wear law, while developed for dry sliding of metals, often holds for polymeric materials. Archard s law implies that the volume of wear will increase linearly for all time. However, for most polymers against metals, wear volume will often deviate from linear behavior, by slowing as a function of time, and occasionally reaching a maximum value. This can result in a parabolic form to the volume loss as a function of time as shown in Equation 13.17. 

---