Nano-scale wear of hard materials: an overview

Publication date: Available online 18 January 2020Source: Current Opinion in Colloid & Interface ScienceAuthor(s): R. Colaço, A.P. SerroAbstractWear of nano/microelectromechanical systems (NEMS/MEMS) involves a limited number of superficial atomic layers. In larger components, where tolerances and surface roughness are usually quite small, wear also occurs essentially in a narrow near-surface region, with no more than few hundreds nanometers. Therefore, in general, macromechanical approaches to wear are not strictly applicable. In spite of the increasing effort, which has been made in the last two decades in this research field, there is still an evident gap between the approach of physicists to atomic wear phenomena and that of materials and mechanical engineers to micro and mesoscale wear. This paper presents an overview on the actual knowledge of the fundamentals of hard materials wear mechanisms, focused in the phenomenology that occurs from the atomic scales up to the scale of some tens of nanometers, aiming to contribute to bridge this gap of comprehension involving the wear at nanometric scales.

Source: Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science - January 18, 2020 Category: Chemistry Source Type: research