Fretting Fatigue Failures in Internal Combustion Engine Components: A Review and Future Scope

With a small oscillatory movement between the contacting bodies held together under the normal load, fretting-related damage and failures are not uncommon in mechanical joints like bolted and gasket joints. One example of a system having multiple bolted and gasket joints, subject to such failures, is the internal combustion (IC) engine. This study aims to provide an overview of different fretting failures observed in the IC engine’s critical components and present an extensive review of various numerical techniques to evaluate fretting failures. Further different important aspects related to fretting fatigue and multiple fretting fatigue initiation methods like critical plane methods, stress invariant methods, continuum damage mechanics-based methods, and fretting-specific parameters are also discussed. Fretting fatigue, being a surface damage phenomenon, is mainly due to the combined interactions between different physics involving tribology contact mechanics, environmental aspects, and materials science; several physical and analytical parameters significant to fretting fatigue damage evaluation are also discussed. Considering the future trend of increasing the power density of IC engines, the importance of critical evaluation of fretting fatigue failures of IC engine components, as a critical requirement for the industry, is proposed towards the end.