Fretting fatigue problems occur in contact regions of two components submitted to contact loading and external cyclic loading or oscillation due to vibration. The contact region is submitted to micro-displacement relative with amplitudes in the rage 5 - 100 μm.
The severe tri-axial stress state and local plastic strain can accelerate cyclic damage accumulation and premature crack nucleation. Under fretting conditions fatigue strength can be reduced by 50 to 70%, relative to conventional fatigue. The strength and life of components under these conditions is a difficult task, due to the complexity of the phenomena of contact and the various factors that control the process of damage accumulation.
In this work, it was built a numerical model to study the fretting process in a sphere-plane contact for RQC-100 steel, using ABAQUS application. The model enabled the analysis of fretting cycles for different combinations of contact load and cyclic stress amplitudes. The effect of normal force and cyclic stress on slip amplitude, tangential force, plastic strain, and dissipated energy in the contact were analyzed.