Lubricant additives to reduce fluid film friction
The proposed chemical additives reduce the fluid film friction of lubricated mechanical components under high-pressure conditions to increase their efficiency.
Mechanical components with sliding surfaces can cause friction which may lead to lower efficiency and higher energy consumption. Rolling bearings and gears are widely used systems where energy is dissipated. These components have small contact areas between the sliding surfaces (around 200 µm in width/diameter) resulting in extremely high pressure (GPa range) regions and the viscosity in these regions may increase significantly.
Researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering have found that long-chain n-alcohols (e.g., 1-dodecanol) reduce the viscosity of lubricant compositions. The effectiveness of these chemical additives is due to the formation of hydrogen bonding under the high contact pressures. Other chemicals with a functional group capable of hydrogen bonding (e.g., amines or carboxylic acids) would also work under elastohydrodynamic lubrication conditions.
One advantage of these chemical additives is that friction is reduced without modifying the film thickness.