Size prediction of particles caused by chipping wear of hard coatings

Hard coatings under cyclic contact loading are often subject to failure caused by chipping or spalling wear. A fracture-based model is developed to predict such wear damage and shows that particles are detached from the coating surface due to cracking, as observed in experiments. Particle detachment is found to depend on the depths of pre-existing cracks, the positions of the cracks relative to major surface asperities, and loading conditions. The model successfully predicts the size scale of the detached particles.