β Scribed by Hugh A. Spikes
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Fourth World Tribology Conference took place in Kyoto in September 2009. It was a memorable and enjoyable meeting, with many excellent presentations from around the world, spanning the full range of tribology research.
This Special Issue contains six papers from this conference, and like the conference itself, spans the range of research currently taking place in lubrication science. There are four experimental papers, one on modelling and one entirely analytical; five on liquid lubrication and one on solid lubrication; three on surfaces and three on lubricant films.
The first paper by Nakamura et al. 1 describes a novel and ingenious method of exploring the rheology of liquid lubricants under very high pressures using tiny, plastically deformable solid particles dispersed in a lubricant. The authors show that the results agree with values estimated from EHL traction tests.
The second by Predescu et al. 2 addresses a major area of interest in lubrication at present: the impact of surface texture on the friction of hydrodynamically lubricated contacts. This experimental paper attempts to measure normal force -i.e. the load support -directly, and shows that surface texturing has a direct influence on this normal force.
The third paper by Tomioka and Miyanaga 3 explores the impact of surface roughness on seal leakage in centrifugal blood pumps. It shows both how performance, in terms of leakage and friction, can be optimised and also describes an interesting phenomenon in which leakage through a seal occurs against a pressure difference.
Paper four by Wang et al. 4 is about solid lubrication. The authors impregnate a steel/TiC powder composite with a molten alloy of Pb-Sn-Ag and produce thereby a large reduction in friction and wear. The effect of volume fraction of the lubricious alloy is explored.
The fifth paper by Wang and Yi 5 describes a multigrid multilevel-based solution of the 1D non-Newtonian, transient thermal EHL model, applicable to spur gears and highlights the not-unexpected importance of slide-roll ratio on thermal behaviour.
In the sixth and final paper, the authors Ionescu and Mihai 6 describe an analytical solution of the thermal hydrodynamic problem of a thrust bearing, a solution which is equally applicable to journal bearings. This is a remarkably effective simplification of the hydrodynamic bearing problem and illustrates how, despite more than a hundred years of research in the field of hydrodynamic lubrication, new analytical solutions can still be found.
Overall, I hope this Special Issue demonstrates the quality and variety of modern research in lubrication and tribology, and as importantly, encourages readers to attend the next World Tribology Congress in Turin in 2013.
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