Project description
Research paves the way for near-frictionless materials
Around one fourth of the global energy losses result from friction and wear. The EU-funded SSLiP project will rely on a new concept called superlubricity, where solid, atomic-sized 2D materials can slide across one another experiencing virtually no friction. Through careful design of colloidal particles coated in these 2D materials, researchers will be able to control the carrier fluid and the mechanical properties of the colloids, as well as their sliding and collective behaviour. SSLiP will get superlubricity off the ground, extending laboratory research to practical applications. Scaling up the idea should help drastically reduce friction losses in passenger cars and help hard drives perform better.
Objective
Friction between moving parts and the associated wear are estimated to be directly responsible for 25% of the world's energy consumption. SSLiP seeks to establish a radically new way to drastically reduce friction, with potentially enormous technological and societal impact. The driving concept is structural superlubricity, extremely low friction that takes place at a lattice misfit between clean, flat, rigid crystalline surfaces. Structural superlubricity is currently a lab curiosity limited to micrometer scale and laboratory times. SSLiP will bring this to the macroscale to impact real-life products. The key idea is the use of tribo-colloids: colloidal particles coated in 2D materials, that will produce a dynamic network of superlubric contacts. Structural incompatibility between arrays of colloids allows us to replicate the low friction on bigger length scales and overcome the statistical roughness of real surfaces. We will leverage our breakthrough result to regenerate the 2D coatings themselves during sliding. Through careful design of these coatings, carrier fluid, and the mechanical properties of the core particles, the chemistry of sliding and collective behaviour of the colloids can be controlled. Synthesis and experiments of individual contacts will be combined with visualisation of colloid dynamics during sliding on larger scales and in-site chemical characterisation. These will be combined with multiscale simulations and theory to bridge the different length scales into a coherent framework. The developed ultra-low friction technology will drastically reduce loss of energy, for example in passenger cars (responsible for around 2 billion tonnes of CO2 per year) and increase the lifetime of parts. It will also enable radically new technologies that are impossible with current lubrication, thus paving the way for e.g. much higher writing speeds in harddisks, where the writing tip will be able to move in full contact with the disk.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringtribologylubrication
- natural sciencesphysical sciencescondensed matter physicssoft matter physics
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materialstwo-dimensional nanostructures
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencescomputational sciencemultiphysics
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Ireland