ACQUISITION OF A TRIBOLOGICAL FACILITY FOR THE ANALYSES OF FRICTION, WEAR, AND LUBRICATION OF GEO-SYSTEMS

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This award will provide funding to build an experimental facility dedicated to Geotribology that will focus on the friction, wear and lubrication of geo-systems, with a parallel equivalency to engineering tribology. The facility will include a tribological system of multiple integrated tools that are commercially built by engineering standards. Via this project, a new facility, GeoTrib, will be created to study the fundamentals of friction, wear, and lubrication in geological systems, from faults to the base of glaciers. The facility will allow multi-scale and multi-condition analyses of earthquake physics, fault stability, and glacial motion and will impact socio-economic issues of seismic hazard and climate change. Further, the facility will use engineering methods and standards and thus will contribute to narrowing the gap between the geoscience community of friction and wear, and the equivalent, large engineering community. GeoTrib will be an open facility for interested researchers who could conduct their experimental work with minimal support of the local team thanks to its versatile, modular design. Until recently, tribological techniques have not been widely applied to geological problems. The facility will utilize engineering tribological methodologies and standards for experimental studies of fundamental crustal and mantle mechanical problems that are too difficult to conduct with existing geophysics systems. GeoTrib will be used for analyses of faulting processes, earthquake physics, glacier flow, landslide creep, debris flow, stream-bed erosion, volcanic eruptions and lava flows. Potential research projects include: (1) the effects of sample scale on roughness, friction and wear; (2) the effects of water presence, water saturation, and temperature (-25 degrees C to 1,000 degrees C) on plasticity and healing rates of faults zones; (3) the dynamic friction and fluid-solid interactions at elevated temperature; (4) static and dynamic strength of bi-material faults; (5) the evolution of fault hardness with temperature, velocity, and displacement; (6) testing theoretical friction/wear/lubrication models at crustal conditions of temperature and water presence; (7) investigating brittle-ductile transition with thermally-dependent mechanisms, e.g., dislocation climb, grain-boundary-sliding, at the nanoscale; and (8) the fundamentals of ice friction and rock wear at glacier base and icy satellites.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.