Investigating the Fretting of Steel Surfaces in the Presence of Hybrid Anti-Fretting Paste Containing Talc-Graphite-hBN-Molybdenum Disulfide Solid Lubricants

The present work proposes a novel combination of additives dispersed in mineral oil to form a paste that exhibited significant anti-fretting properties as compared to a molybdenum-di-sulfide-containing commercial paste. The proposed paste contained 20 wt% MoS 2 apart from 20 wt% talc, 15 wt%. graphite to 10 wt% hBN as additives, and 65 wt% mineral oil. The average mass of the bearing raceway tested with the proposed paste was 0.0063 ± 0.0045 g thus, exhibiting 82% less average mass loss than the bearing raceways tested with commercial paste (0.0354 ± 0.0021 g). Additionally, the machine vision system exhibited 40% fewer false brinelling areas with the proposed paste (0.9400 ± 0.108 mm 2 ) as compared to the commercial paste (1.605 ± 0.822 mm 2 ). Optical microscope images of the false brinelling areas further indicated debris adhesion, plastic deformation, and crack formation during the fretting phenomenon. Furthermore, the Raman spectrograph indicated the deposition of the solid lubricants on the steel surfaces during the fretting tests.