Coupled evolution of piston asperity and cylinder bore contour of piston/cylinder pair in axial piston pump

The wear condition of the piston/cylinder pair is crucial to the performance and reliability of the axial piston pump. The hard piston surface, the soft cylinder bore surface, and the interface oil film affects each other during the wear process. Specifically, in the mixed lubrication region, the geometry of the hard piston surface asperity directly affects the wear of soft cylinder bore surface, while the asperities may deform or even degrade when penetrating and sliding against the cylinder bore. So far, there is no suitable method to simulate their coupled evolution. This paper proposed a wear process simulation model considering the real-time interaction between the elasto-plastic deformation of the piston surface asperity, the wear contour of the cylinder bore, and the lubrication condition of the interface. An offline library of the elasto-plastic constitutive behavior of the asperity based on the finite element method (FEM) is established as a part of the simulation model to precisely analyze the deformation and degradation of the asperity and quickly invoke them in the numerical wear process simulation. The simulation and experimental results show that the piston asperity and the cylinder bore contour converge to a steady state after running-in for about 0.5 h. The distribution of the simulated asperity degradation and wear depth is also verified by the experiment.