Mission Statement
Wear of Materials Inc., a non-profit organization, exists to advance the status of understanding of wear by collecting and disseminating information on related research and practice via conferences, symposia and publications.
History of WOM
The first Wear of Materials (WOM) Conference was held in April, 1977 in St. Louis, MO. It grew from the then Lubrication Division (LD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). There had been two earlier attempts to organize conferences on wear but no collaborating technical societies could be found. The search was limited to other mechanical and lubrication groups in the US and elsewhere.
The Wear Committee of the LD debated the issue at length, about equally split on the proper emphasis for a conference on wear. As the debate continued it became apparent that the committee was split on the definition of wear. The divergent views could not have been more obvious once stated. They were:
- Wear results from lubrication failure,
- Wear is the loss of materials when two solids interact.
The first view was held by most of the members of the very successful LD. Their technical base is in the physics and mechanics of fluids. Wear-as-material-loss is a topic in material science/engineering and solid mechanics. The Wear Committee decided to try one conference at least, expecting several co-sponsors in the materials societies. The name of the conference was to be Wear of Materials to emphasize the distinction between the two views.
From the outset the standards for the conference papers were high. In the first several conferences each paper was vetted by three reviewers. Later two reviewers were called upon.
Few of the very many WOM papers could be accepted by the ASME Journal of Lubrication Technology because of page count limitations. Most WOM papers were therefore published as Conference Proceedings of the ASME. Since 1987, WOM papers have been included in special issues of the premier journal, Wear.
Contact us: admin@wearofmaterials.org
Peter J. Blau is a Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member, and Leader of the Tribology Research User Center in the Materials Science and Technology Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Lehigh University, and a Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering from The Ohio State University. His research career began with studies of impact-melted meteorites, and led to an appointment as a co-investigator for the NASA Apollo Lunar Sample Examination Program (ALSEP) in the early 1970s. With more than 30 years of research, development, and project management experience in materials engineering and tribology, he has held positions at the Air Force Materials Laboratory, the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), the Office of Naval Research, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Mark Gee is an NPL Fellow in the Materials Division at the National Physical Laboratory. Recently he was awarded the status of visiting Professor at the University of Southampton and is a core member of the national Centre for Advanced Tribology and Southampton. He leads projects that are concerned with the development of an improved infrastructure for friction and wear testing in the UK. Particular research interests are the mechanisms of abrasive and erosive wear for ceramics and other hard materials, and the development of nanotribology test techniques. He has published over 200 papers and reports. He has recently been Chairman of the UK Institute of Physics Tribology Group, and was recently Secretary of the Surface Engineering Division of the UK Institute of Materials, Mining and Minerals. He is also a member of the International Advisory Editorial Boards of Tribology International, and Tribology – Materials Surfaces and Interfaces. He is a member of various standards committees including ASTM Committee G2 on Wear, ISO TC 206 Advanced Ceramics, and ISO TC 229 Nanotechnologies where he lead a project that recently published the first international standard on nanotechnologies.
Peter M. Lee is a Staff Engineer and the Chief Tribologist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio Texas. He established the Tribology Research and Evaluations Group in 2011 following his move to the US from the University of Leeds, where he was a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow.
Peter Filip, PhD, DSc
