Ravikiran and S. Jahanmir, “Effect of Interfacial Layers on Wear Behavior of a Dental Ceramic,” Journal of the American Ceramic Society, 83 (2000) 1831-1833.
Wear studies on a glass-ceramic dental restorative material were performed under two types of lubrication conditions with distilled water. In one set of experiments, the contact interface was continuously flushed with fresh water to remove the wear debris. In a second set of experiments, the water was not replaced during the testing period. Flushing resulted in a lower friction coefficient and more than twice the wear volume compared with the nonflushing condition. Examination of the worn surfaces in SEM confirmed the presence of an interfacial layer at the sliding interface for the nonflushing experiments. These results suggest that the specific conditions at the sliding interfaces and particularly the nature of interfacial layers must be considered when evaluating the tribological performance of ceramics and especially when the wear data from different studies are compared.