Revealing the Hidden World of Wear and Friction

Tribology affects our lives to a great extent. Everything that man makes wears out almost always as a result of relative motion between surfaces. A majority of industrial stoppages and failures are associated with interacting moving parts such as gears, bearings, couplings, cams, clutches, etc. Wear in one form or another and energy dissipated by friction cost national economies billion of dollars per annum. Also our human body contain interacting surfaces, e.g. human joints, which are subjected to lubrication and wear. Tribology has been advanced to a level where it is now possible to offer some control of friction and wear and achieve savings in resources and energy. Friction and wear gradually become known as controllable phenomena. In this paper, the close relationship between observation of the usually hidden processes of wear and friction, the development of analytical models to explain wear and friction and advances in the control of wear and friction is reviewed. Expectations of future advances in tribology are then discussed.