The reach of tribology has expanded in diverse fields and tribology related research activities have seen immense growth during the last decade. This review takes stock of the recent advances in research pertaining to different aspects of tribology within the last 2 to 3 years. Different aspects of tribology that have been reviewed including lubrication, wear and surface engineering, biotribology, high temperature tribology, and computational tribology. This review attempts to highlight recent research and also presents future outlook pertaining to these aspects. It may however be noted that there are limitations of this review. One of the most important of these is that tribology being a highly multidisciplinary field, the research results are widely spread across various disciplines and there can be omissions because of this. Secondly, the topics dealt with in the field of tribology include only some of the salient topics (such as lubrication, wear, surface engineering, biotribology, high temperature tribology, and computational tribology) but there are many more aspects of tribology that have not been covered in this review. Despite these limitations it is hoped that such a review will bring the most recent salient research in focus and will be beneficial for the growing community of tribology researchers.

Specially designed steels with carbon contents from 0.6 to 1.0 wt.% were isothermally transformed at very low temperatures, between 220 and 270°C, in order to obtain a nano-structured bainitic microstructure. It is shown that the wear resistance in dry rolling-sliding of these nano-structured steels is significantly superior to that of bainitic steels transformed at higher temperatures with similar hardness values. In addition to the highly refined microstructure, the transformation under strain to martensite (TRIP effect), contributes to the plasticity of the nanoscaled steels, increasing surface hardness during testing, thus reducing the wear rate.

Self-lubricating materials are becoming more widespread in fields like metal forming or power generation due to the inability to use conventional lubricants in high-temperature (HT) applications. In an effort to summarise the progress done in this field, a detailed literature review has been carried out, ranging from micron-thickness thin films to hardfacings and bulk materials, and classified by the reported solid lubricants. Moreover, the most-cited deposition techniques have been reviewed for each lubricant class in addition to their advantages and limitations. HT friction and wear data for self-lubricating materials have also been examined in order to identify effective lubrication ranges and general trends in their tribological behaviour, which is expected to be useful for researchers interested in this field. Finally, several apparent research gaps have been described, with suggestions for new experimental work that could lead to the development of new high-temperature selflubricating materials.

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