Current and Future Trends in Tribological Research

Abstract

The paper provides a commentary on the theme of “Current and Future Trends in Tribological Research: Fundamentals and Applications”, which is a special feature issue commemorating the 10th anniversary of the journal, Lubricants. A historical discourse is provided regarding various aspects of tribology as a multi-disciplinary subject that interacts in an inter-disciplinary manner with many other subjects: multi-body dynamics, thermofluids and heat transfer, contact mechanics, surface science, chemistry, rheology, data science, and biology, to name but a few. Such interactions lead to many important topics including propulsion with different sources of energy, mitigating emissions, palliation of friction, enhancing durability and sustainability, optimization through detailed analysis, and the use of artificial intelligence. Additionally, issues concerning kinetics at various physical scales (from macroscale to microscale onto mesoscale and nanoscale) affecting the kinematics of contacts are discussed. The broad range of considered applications includes vehicular powertrains, rotor bearings, electrical machines, mammalian endo-articular joints, nanobiological attachment/detachment, and locomotion. Current state-of-the-art tribological research is highlighted within a multi-physics, multi-scale framework, an approach not hitherto reported in the open literature.

Vastness of Tribology Research Fields and Their Contribution to Sustainable Development

“…Despite the very large number of references (more than seven hundred in the first paper, and more than a thousand in the second one, over 150 pages long), the authors themselves have stated that there can be limitations in the reviews because of the multidisciplinarity of tribology, that makes its results spread across various disciplines, and because of the numerousness of the topics studied by tribology, so that many additional aspects are not covered in the reviews. A different classification of the tribological researches has been more recently used in the work presented in [26]: tribodynamics, electro-tribodynamics of modern propulsion systems, tribology of engineered surfaces, artificial intelligence in tribology, biotribology and biomimetics, nanotribology, computational and multi-scale tribology, tribology in space and other extreme environments, measurements monitoring and tribo-sensing.…”

“…The main aim of the paper is to highlight how various and numerous the subjects investigated by tribology are, and their important contribution to sustainability. It is not the intention of the author to make an extensive review of the tribological studies, also because there is a number of review papers already available in the literature (see for instance the work presented in [24][25][26]). However, some fundamental works and several recent reviews on specific topics are cited in this paper, to which the reader can refer to for more in-depth information.…”

Vastness of Tribology and its Contribution for a Sustainable Development

“…Despite the very big number of references (more than seven hundred in the first paper, and more than a thousand in the second one, over 150 pages long), the authors themselves stated that there can be limitations in the reviews because of the multidisciplinarity of tribology, that makes its results spread across various disciplines, and because of the numerousness of the topics studied by tribology so that many additional aspects are not covered in the reviews. A different classification of the tribological researches has been more recently used in [26]: tribodynamics, electro-tribodynamics of modern propulsion systems, tribology of engineered surfaces, artificial intelligence in tribology, biotribology and biomimetics, nanotribology, computational and multiscale tribology, tribology in space and other extreme environments, measurements monitoring and tribo-sensing.…”

“…The main aim of the paper is to highlight how various and numerous are the subjects investigated by tribology and their important contribution to sustainability. It is not intention of the author to make an extensive review on the tribological studies, also because there is a number of review papers already available in literature (see for instance [24][25][26]). However, some fundamental works and several recent reviews on specific topics are cited in the paper to which the reader can refer for more in-depth information.…”

Vastness of Tribology and its Contribution for a Sustainable Development

“…Despite the very big number of references (more than seven hundred in the first paper, and more than a thousand in the second one, over 150 pages long), the authors themselves stated that there can be limitations in the reviews because of the multidisciplinarity of tribology, that makes its results spread across various disciplines, and of the several topics of tribology so that many additional aspects are not covered in the reviews. A different classification of the tribological researches has been more recently used in [26]: tribodynamics, electro-tribodynamics of modern propulsion systems, tribology of engineered surfaces, artificial intelligence in tribology, biotribology and biomimetics, nanotribology, computational and multi-scale tribology, tribology in space and other extreme environments, measurements monitoring and tribo-sensing.…”