An understanding of the relationship between chemical structure and lubricant performance is highly desirable from both a fundamental and a practical perspective, such knowledge being vital to improve the performance of mineral oils and to guide the design of future synthetic lubricants. The rheological properties of alkanes of intermediate molecular size (C20–C40) are of particular interest as...

Two decades ago, the literature dealing with the possible applications of low molar mass liquid crystals, also called monomer liquid crystals (MLCs), only included about 50 references. Today, thousands of papers, conference reports, books or book chapters and patents refer to the study and applications of MLCs as lubricants and lubricant additives and efforts are made to develop new commercial ...

An effort was made to study and characterize the evolution of transient tribological wear in the presence of sliding contact. Sliding contact is often characterized experimentally via the standard ASTM D4172 four-ball test, and these tests were conducted for varying times ranging from 10 seconds to 1 hour, as well as at varying temperatures and loads. A numerical model was developed to simulate...

An ionic liquid is a liquid salt consisting of anions and cations. Since Wilkes [1] synthesized a low melting point ionic liquid that is stable in air in 1992, there has been active fundamen‐ tal research and engineering development directed at applications. In the field of tribology, where application is focused toward lubricants, the number of related papers [3]-[28] has in‐ creased every yea...

Current research on room-temperature ionic liquids as lubricants is described. Ionic liquids possess excellent properties such as non-volatility, non-flammability, and thermo-oxidative stability. The potential use of ionic liquids as lubricants was first proposed in 2001 and approximately 70 articles pertaining to fundamental research on ionic liquids have been published through May 2009. A lar...