Authors: Lim, S.C.
Abstract: This paper presents a summary of the author's personal view of the development of wear-mechanism maps, culminating in the presentation of some recently proposed maps. These maps, which present wear data in a graphical manner, are able to provide a more global picture of how materials in relative motions behave when different sliding conditions are encountered; they also provide the relationships between various dominant mechanisms of wear that are observed to occur under different sliding conditions as well as the anticipated rates of wear. Some thoughts on future directions for research in this area are also presented.