Lubricant-surface system mitigating in-cylinder friction

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The emerging modern approach to tribology of load bearing surfaces is to treat theconjunction as a lubricant-surface system. This is contrary to the traditional non-integrated approaches where lubricant rheology is determined according to its load carrying capacity, shear characteristics and an additive package to service a host of requirements in general terms. The same has also been true of surface preparation in terms of wear characteristics, fatigue strength and envisaged topography, for example in preparation of coatings, method of deposition, micro-structural attributes, coating layer thickness, mechanical properties and topographical measures.However, recent detailed studies clearly demonstrate that the interactions between the lubricant molecular species and surface topographical and physic-mechanical properties play keys in the formation of ultra-thin adsorbed films which affect the trib0-chemical and adhesive characteristics of the lubricant-surface system at the scale of minutiae. These characteristics are translated to micro-scale observation of friction, through a plethora of not fundamentally understood phenomena, which are also affected by operating conjunctional conditions such as contact kinematics,loading and thermodynamics.Clearly, a timely integrated combined study of system dynamics, tribology (across the physics of scale) and physical chemistry molecular/atomic interactions is necessary to understand the multi-scale multi-physics nature of the lubricant-surface system.