Nanotechnology with Emphasis on Tribology: A Combined Experimental and Simulation Study

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Abstract CTS-9871919 Cummings This is a grant to undertake a fundamental study of lubrication at manometer scale, including experiments with surface rheometry and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation. The project will be a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration. The first goal of the research is to achieve overlap in shear rate between experiments and simulations with the same systems. This overlap, sought for over a decade, will be achieved through significant advances in the capabilities of both the experimental and numerical approaches. A second goal is to extend both the experimental and computational efforts to more complicated systems and surface characteristics, including surfaces with chemical and topographical heterogeneity, that are of primary technological importance. A third goal is to study not only the steady-state shear response of nano-tribology systems but also their transient behavior, including the technologically important issues related to adhesion. A final, but overarching, goal of the work is to seek new methods to reduce the friction and wear of moving surfaces separated by only nanometers. These goals will be attained through coordinated experiments and calculations that probe the fundamental phenomena involved at a molecular level. The motivation for this work is that devices with moving parts separated by only nanometers are already of immense technological and economic importance, magnetic recording devices such as computer disk drives, for example. Many other novel micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), such as micro-motors, are under development. The fluid between the moving surfaces in such devices is subjected to extremely high rates of shear strain, 108 s-1 or higher, more than an order of magnitude higher than previously attained in any controlled experiment. Often, lubrication is essential to the practical use of such devices, and the US data storage industry has identified the development of new lubricants and surf ace finish as one of six major technical objectives to achieving increased recording density and read/write speed. This project results from a proposal submitted in response to NSF 98-20 Partnership in Nanotechnology: Synthesis, Processing and Utilization of Functional Nanostructures (FNS).