A comparative investigation on wear behaviors of physical and chemical vapor deposited bronze coatings for hydraulic piston pump

The cylinder block/valve plate interface is one of the most critical frictional interfaces of the swashplate-type axial piston pump. However, the poor lubrication interface caused rapid wear and high friction loss in an elastohydrodynamic lubrication system, decreasing the pump lifetime. Wear resistant bronze coatings were fabricated on 38CrMoAl substrate by Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), respectively. Ball-on-disc wear tests were performed to comparatively investigate the wear behaviors of the coatings and bulk ductile iron samples. It can be found that the PVD-bronze coating exhibited better wear resistance than the other two samples. This enhanced wear resistance was attributed to the unique composite microstructure and desired mechanical strength, which could resist to mechanical shear and spallation, decreasing friction loss. The appropriate hardness of (1.33 +/- 0.07) GPa could be beneficial for enhancing its wear resistance. The PVD-bronze coating possessed a much lower and stable coefficient of friction (about 0.1) and wear rate (about 6000 lm(3).N-1.m(-1)) under the loading forces of about 100 N after 20 min. The wear mechanism was the abrasive wear. (c) 2024 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics.