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The purpose of this study is to investigate the tribological performance of the developed self-healing Al6061 composite and to optimize the operating conditions for enhanced tribo-performance of the developed material.

A unique procedure has been adopted to convert the sand casted Al6061 into self-healing material by piercing a low melting point solder material with and without MoS₂. Taguchi-based L9 orthogonal array has been used to optimize the number of experiments and analyze the influence of operating parameters such as speed, sliding distance and load on material wear.

The results reveal that the paper shows the self-healing and self-repair is possible in metal through piercing low melting point alloy. Then, the load has a significant influence over other input parameters in predicting the wear behavior of developed material. Moreover, addition of MoS₂ does not affect the tribo-performance of the developed material. The study concludes that the developed self-healing Al6061 has huge potential to be used in mechanical industry.

The concept of self-healing in metals are very challenging task due to very slow diffusion rate of atoms at room temperature. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to explore the other new techniques to create self-healing in metals.

The self-healing materials had shown huge potential to be used in mechanical industry. The current investigation established a structural fabrication and testing procedure to understand the effects of various parameters on wear. The conclusion from the experimentation and optimization helps researchers to developed and create self-healing in metals.

The previous research works were not focused on the study of tribological property of self-healing metal composite. With the best of author’s knowledge, no one has reported tribological study, as well as optimization of parameters such as speed, load and sliding distance on wear in self-healing metals composite.

The journal bearings subjected to heavy load and slow speed operate in mixed lubrication regime causing contact between the interacting surfaces and resulting in wear. Complexity of wear behavior and lack of unifying theory/model make wear-control very challenging.

In the present research work, theoretical and experimental investigations have been conducted to explore the effect of grooving arrangements on the wear behavior of journal bearing operating in mixed lubrication regime. The theoretical model of Hirani (2005) that uses mass conserving cavitation algorithm has been used to determine the bearing eccentricity for different groove arrangements (with varying groove location and extent) for identifying a groove arrangement that minimizes the wear. The wear tests on the grooved bearings were conducted after suitable running-in of the new bearings on a fully automated journal bearing test set-up. A load and speed combination required to operate the bearing in mixed lubrication was used. The performance of different arrangement of bearing was evaluated by measuring their weight loss after the test.

Wear was significantly reduced with the use of proper groove arrangement for a bearing operating in mixed lubrication regime.

The improvement in bearing performance by providing grooves has been the subject matter of several studies in the past, but these studies were confined to the hydrodynamic operative regime of the bearing. In the present work, seven different combinations of axial and radial groove arrangement were tried, which has not been reported in any other work.