Failure Analysis on Wearing and Cracking of Outer Surface of a Submersible Pump Sleeve

Macro analysis was done to the cracked sleeve, and according to the obvious characteristics of furrows and size reduction it was concluded that the first failure mode of the sleeve was mainly wear failure. SEM observation results show that there were roughly circumferential parallel microcracks in the wear area, as well as dense sticky scales and wear marks. Energy spectrum analysis found that there was a large difference between the compositions of these scales and the sleeve, which show that the scales were migrated from its matching component. It can be concluded that adhesive wear occurred between the sleeve and the guide shell (bearing hole) used to fix the bearing, which eventually led to the cracking of the sleeve. The problem of sleeve wearing and cracking was well solved by increasing the inner diameter of the bearing hole.