The effect of controlled frequency and amplitude of vibration on friction

An in-house pin-on-disc apparatus is designed and constructed to perform the tests and the design of experiments technique is utilized to determine the effect of vibration, amplitude of vibration, surface roughness, and sliding speed and their cross influence on coefficient of friction for 304 stainless steel and Alloy 6061 Aluminum. The design is performed using response surface method (RSM). The coefficient of friction (CoF) is analyzed as a nonlinear function of the factors and predicted by a second-order polynomial equation. Results suggested that the presence of vibration affect the friction function CoF considerably for both metals. The friction function linearly decreases with the increases of vibration and amplitude of vibration, non-linearly decreases with the increases of sliding speed and linearly increases with the increases of the surface roughness until the middle range is reached and then there is non-linearly decrease there after. Similar trends of friction functions are observed for Alloy 6061 Aluminum with a reduction of almost 15% except for the case with amplitude of vibration where the variation showed more significant affect on the friction function when Alloy 6061 Aluminum disk is used.