Impact Fretting.

In the section "Type of Vibration," the effect of a cyclically varying normal force
superimposed on

the tangential movement was considered for situations in which the two surfaces remained in constant
contact. The

circumstances where the two surfaces can become separated during some part of each cycle are
somewhat different,

because of the contribution of impact. As mentioned earlier in the section "Fretting Wear in Mechanical
Components,"

this is a problem frequently encountered in heat exchangers, where pipes or fuel rod containers are
restrained by supports

or baffles but experience vibration as a result of fluid flow.

Two types of wear can be distinguished in the practical case encountered in nuclear reactors. The first
involves whirling

of the tube resulting in intermittent unidirectional sliding and is obviously not fretting. The small-
amplitude movement

that results in fretting-type damage is the result of flow-induced vibrations. The important parameters
are impact force,

clearance between tube and support, support plate thickness, and frequency. The wear rate for stainless
steel increases by
an order of magnitude for a tenfold increase in impact force, and a similar increase for a fourfold
increase in the

clearance. Increasing the support plate thickness from 10 to 20 mm (0.4 to 0.8 in.) reduces the wear rate
from 0.7 to 0.2

m (30 to 8 in.) per 106

cycles. At frequencies below 40 Hz, there is no effect of frequency, but at higher frequencies the

wear rate is reduced due to the reduction in contact time per cycle (Ref 34). These results were obtained
at room

temperature, whereas in operation these devices would be at a higher temperature and thus the wear
rates could be

profoundly influenced both by temperature and environment; such effects are discussed in the section
"Environmental

Effects."

Many years of work by de Gee (Ref 35) indicated that the combination of impact and fretting was more
severe than

fretting alone, whereas much of the work on tube and tube support vibration suggests that the impact
contributes little to

the wear rate and that continuous contact is more damaging (Ref 36, 37). An important variable in
considering this type of
motion is the phase relation between the normal and tangential vibrations. Differences are to be
expected between impact

at maximum tangential velocity and zero velocity. Also, the time period per cycle that contact is made
will be of great

significance.