Worm gears are usually used in industrial applications with the material pairing of hard worm and softer worm wheel, where the failure mode wear often limits the service life. Up to now, extensive, costly and time-consuming component wear tests need to be carried out for each tribological pairing in order to calculate the amount of wear on worm wheels. Therefore, no practical and efficient experimental method is currently available to optimize material-lubricant pairings with respect to wear capacity for worm gear drives. For this reason, a model contact wear test was developed applying a twin-disk test rig. Based on this, the paper covers a new wear calculation method to characterize the wear behavior of steel-bronze rolling-sliding contacts regarding worm wheels. Therefore, the basics for the new calculation method for a model contact will be presented. Furthermore, the validation of the newly developed wear calculation method on the basis of test results of experimental investigations using the twin-disk test rig is addressed. Subsequently, results of the new wear calculation method are compared to results of the wear calculation method for worm wheels for individual tribosystems. Special focus will be given to similar trends in the calculated wear between the worm gear contact and the model contact. This new calculation method enables, in combination with wear tests on the twin-disk machine, efficient information on the wear behavior of worm gears and the development of optimized material-lubricant pairings concerning wear performance for worm gear drives. © 2023, The Author(s).
