Friction reduction with advanced contacts – FRAC
Project duration
2025 - 2027
Project Category
SLO
Contact Information
Reduction of friction in lubricated contacts can be achieved using a recently discovered solid-liquid slip mechanism. This can be done, for example, by coating steel surfaces with diamond-like carbon (DLC) or other approaches that reduce the surface energy of the materials used for the contact pair.
Reducing the friction is however not enough. One also needs to know the thin lubricant film thickness separating the moving parts of the contact. If too thin, the bodies in contact start to experience wear. This leads to contact failure. A machine design engineer needs a simple tool to estimate lubricant’s thickness. In contacts coated with DLC, the lubricant film thickness has however not been measured yet, because the currently available measuring devices use light which poorly reflects from very dark DLC. In this project, we first propose the development of two new experimental methods to overcome the current measuring limitations in determining film thickness and pressure distributions. Once having such devices developed, we will measure the film thickness and pressure distributions in DLC-coated and other advanced contacts, use these measurements to determine the correlations among various contact parameters to acquire new insights into friction-reduction mechanisms, and finally generate simple film thickness formulas for DLC-coated and other advanced contacts. This way we shall contribute to Slovenia’s scientific and industrial strives in reducing environmental pollution by improving frictional performances of engineering systems.