Experimental Investigation of the Relationship Between Lubricants' Tribological Properties and Their Lubricating Performances in Cold Rolling

In this paper, three lubricants are tested by a four-ball tribo-tester and in a cold rolling process. Our experimental results show that the data from the four-ball tests and the cold rolling tests are generally consistent with each other, implying the tribological properties measured by a four-ball tribo-tester are able to indicate the lubricants' lubricating performance in cold rolling reasonably well. Nevertheless, our experimental results also reveal certain discrepancies between the data from the four-ball tests and cold rolling tests. Especially, the friction coefficients from the four-ball tests are always considerably smaller than their counterparts from the cold rolling tests. Based on our analysis, the friction coefficients measured by cold rolling tests appear to be a more reliable indicator for the lubricants' performance in cold rolling than the friction coefficients measured by the four-ball tests.