Rubber Wear: History, Mechanisms, and Perspectives

This paper presents a comprehensive review of wear mechanisms, with a primary focus on rubber wear under sliding conditions. Beginning with classical wear theories, including the Archard and Rabinowicz models, we analyze their applicability to both metals and elastomers and discuss extensions relevant to elastic contact and multiscale surface roughness. Various experimental studies on rubber, such as abrasion by sharp tools, erosion by particle impact, and wear during sliding on rough substrates, are reviewed and interpreted. The effects of environmental factors, such as oxygen and lubrication, are also discussed. In addition, we review a recently proposed wear model based on fatigue crack growth within asperity contact regions, which accounts for energy dissipation and multiscale interactions. This model explains the wide variability in the wear coefficient and predicts wear rates consistent with experimental observations across a broad range of conditions. It also explains the formation mechanism and provides the size distribution of rubber wear particles, from micrometer-scale up to severe cut-chip-chunk (CCC) wear. The results have implications for tire wear and the environmental impact of microscale wear debris (microplastics).