Standardization News

ASTM Committee G02 Celebrates Half a Century

There's hardly any time to spare

When estimating costs of wear;

With millions added every day,

We must keep harmful wear at bay.

So writes Peter J. Blau, longtime ASTM member and unofficial poet laureate of ASTM International Committee G02 on Wear and Erosion, which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2014.

Blau, who has written and compiled limericks and other short verse about wear and erosion as a hobby throughout his career in tribology, sums up the importance of G02 by saying, "Sooner or later everyone has a wear problem. Lacking a global, fundamental model that can predict every type of behavior based only on material properties, testing is essential for the development of wear-resistant materials and surface treatments."Frank Heymann, one of the founders of G02, says that the committee was approved by the ASTM board of directors on Sept. 17, 1963, with the first meeting being held the following February. Originally known as Committee G02 on Erosion by Cavitation or Impingement, G02 was renamed Wear and Erosion in 1972.

According to Blau, G02 standards cover several important wear situations and enable progress in the science and application of materials technology to improve the longevitiy of surface damage-critical systems like bearings, gears, seals, sliding bearings and other surfaces that can be exposed to abrasion or erosion.

Key G02 standards include the following.

As for the future of G02 and its standards, Blau says, "I would like to see more extension of the G02 standards to the growing field of coatings and surface treatments, and to applications like micro-pitting of gear, biotribology (implants) and tribo-corrosion (wear and corrosion synergism)."

Blau describes the following ways that industry can benefit in many ways from the work of G02. For example, the biomedical community can use G02 wear testing experience in the development of new implant materials. Also, high temperature challenges to alleviate fretting or sliding contact in jet engines and every conversion systems could be met by wear testing standards.

"These are difficult and expensive testing problems to tackle, but they are also important in enabling new technology," says Blau.

As Blau notes in the final verse of his 50th anniversary poem:

Five productive decades passed

Yet G02's standards seem to last;

Now celebration is in store

As G02 plans for fifty more!

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