Current three-body abrasive wear theories are based on a macroscale abrasive indentation process,and these theories claim that material wear cannot be achieved without damaging the hard mating surface.In this study,the process of three-body nano-abrasive wear of a system including a single crystalline silicon substrate,an amorphous silica cluster,and a polyurethane pad,based on a chemical mechanical polishing(CMP)process,is investigated via molecular dynamics simulations.The cluster slid in a suspended state in smooth regions and underwent rolling impact in the asperity regions of the silicon surface,realizing non-damaging monoatomic material removal.This proves that indentation-plowing is not necessary when performing CMP material removal.Therefore,a non-indentation rolling-sliding adhesion theory for three-body nano-abrasive wear between ultrasoft/hard mating surfaces is proposed.This wear theory not only unifies current mainstream CMP material removal theories,but also clarifies that monoatomic material wear without damage can be realized when the indentation depth is less than zero,thereby perfecting the relationship between material wear and surface damage.These results provide new understanding regarding the CMP microscopic material removal mechanism as well as new research avenues for three-body abrasive wear theory at the monoatomic scale.

We demonstrated that the formation and solidification of a continuous confined water film played a very important role in changing the elastic modulus of the wet polymer substrate in a nanoindentation process by a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation of this process. It was found that as the water content increased, the elastic modulus of the wet polymer substrate showed a non-monotonic change. Relative to the dry polymer substrate, the elastic modulus of the wet polymer first decreased. This is because the appearance of a confined water film caused the force between the polymer substrate and the indenter to change from repulsion to attraction. Subsequently, as the confined water film gradually solidified and then weakened, the elastic modulus of the wet polymer slowly increased and then rapidly increased due to a large number of interstitial water molecules gradually penetrating the polymer substrate. Therefore, it is unreasonable to explain the wet polymer degradation during nanoindentation only from the plasticization and anti-plasticization effects based on the hydrogen bond breaking and formation during stretching. The above-mentioned results will help to more comprehensively understand the degradation mechanism of the polymers' encounter with water, thus promoting further practical applications for polymers.

The loading process among the silicon substrate, silica cluster and polyurethane pad was performed by molecular dynamics simulations. The results showed that the interaction force between the cluster and pad did not change with the working pressure at low load stage due to strong fluidity of pad atoms. But at high load stage, the interaction force would increase with increase of the working pressure owing to the reduction of pad fluidity. These demonstrate that the contact status between the abrasives and pad will change from an elastic contact to plastic contact with increase of working pressure for a chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process. Finally, a unified mechanical model for the single abrasive during CMP under different loads was established.