Antifretting smörjfetter baserade på joniska och nanomaterial

Fretting damage is caused by small relative displacements of the contacting surfaces. The displacements occur due to vibrations and imposed operational oscillations like those found in rolling bearings.

This project will address the challenges of fretting damage in rolling bearings by studying greases with ionic thickeners.

This will involve adding to greases non-halogenated ionic liquids as antiwear and friction reducing additives and surfactants for copper nanoparticles.

The lubricating performance of the novel greases will be evaluated for a range of fretting conditions in Hertzian point contacts and in angular contact bearings.

The ability of copper nanoparticles to form protective and self-healing tribofilms will be explored and the effect of ionic lubricant architecture on the tribofilm formation in oscillating rolling element bearings will also be elucidated.

Spectroscopic techniques will be employed to analyse formulations, trace chemical changes in the lubricants and on surfaces.

The surfaces will be analysed using a range of surface sensitive techniques such as ToF-SIMS to deduce tribochemical reaction pathways and suggest formation mechanisms of non-sacrificial and sacrificial boundary films.

The findings will be vital in grease design for applications involving small amplitude reciprocating motion to extend bearing service life, durability, reliability and sustainability of a wide range of machinery including wind turbines, trains and electrified vehicles.