Friction and wear of metals are critically influenced by the microstructures of the bodies constituting the tribological contact. Understanding the microstructural evolution taking place over the lifetime of a tribological system therefore is crucial for strategically designing tribological systems with tailored friction and wear properties. Here, we focus on the single-crystalline High-Entropy Alloy CoCrFeMnNi that is prone to form twins at room temperature. Deformation twins feature a pronounced orientation dependence with a tension-compression anisotropy, a distinct strain release in an extended volume and robust onset stresses. This makes deformation twinning an ideal probe to experimentally investigate the complex stress fields occurring in a tribological contact. Our results unambiguously show a grain orientation dependence of twinning under tribological load. It is clearly shown, that twinning cannot be attributed to a single crystal direction parallel to a sample coordinate axes. With deformation twins in the microstructure, stress field models can be validated to make them useable for all different tribological systems.
