Fretting Wear-Fatigue Life Prediction for Aero-Engine’s Involute Spline Couplings Based on Abaqus

Abstract

This paper reports on a method developed for predicting the fretting wear-fatigue of an aero-engine’s involute spline couplings, including finite-element analysis, method development, and model prediction. The contact stress and sliding distance of the engine’s spline couplings have been investigated using the finite-element method. The fretting wear was calculated based on modified Archard’s equations and application of the in-built Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) adaptive mesh-smoothing algorithm in Abaqus software. Ignoring the direction and position of the fretting fatigue cracks and taking into consideration the influence of fretting wear on fretting fatigue, a method for estimating the fretting wear-fatigue life of an aero-engine’s involute spline couplings has been proposed in this paper. The results have shown that the contact stress was proportional to the torque, which first decreased before increasing when the contact region moved from the top of the tooth to its root. Following this increase, the sliding distance started to decrease along the axial direction of the spline tooth. In order to improve the fretting wear-fatigue life of the spline coupling, further measures should be taken to reduce the dynamic load factor of the spline coupling as far as possible, as well as to increase the contact length of the spline coupling and reduce the friction coefficient of the spline coupling’s materials. A reliable numerical basis for the design and maintenance of aero-engine’s involute spline couplings has been provided in this paper.