Title

A Possible Link Between Macroscopic Wear and Temperature Dependent Friction Behaviors of MoS2 Coatings

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2008

Publication Source

Tribology Letters

Abstract

Studies to explore the nature of friction, and in particular thermally activated friction in macroscopic tribology, have lead to a series of experiments on thin coatings of molybdenum disulfide. Coatings of predominately molybdenum disulfide were selected for these experiments; five different coatings were used: MoS2/Ni, MoS2/Ti, MoS2/Sb2O3, MoS2/C/Sb2O3, and MoS2/Au/Sb2O3. The temperatures were varied over a range from −80 °C to 180 °C. The friction coefficients tended to increase with decreasing temperature. Activation energies were estimated to be between 2 and 10 kJ/mol from data fitting with an Arrhenius function. Subsequent room temperature wear rate measurements of these films under dry nitrogen conditions at ambient temperature demonstrated that the steady-state wear behavior of these coatings varied dramatically over a range of K = 7 × 10−6 to 2 × 10−8 mm3/(Nm). It was further shown that an inverse relationship between wear rate and the sensitivity of friction coefficient with temperature exists. The highest wear-rate coatings showed nearly athermal friction behavior, while the most wear resistant coatings showed thermally activated behavior. Finally, it is hypothesized that thermally activated behavior in macroscopic tribology is reserved for systems with stable interfaces and ultra-low wear, and athermal behavior is characteristic to systems experiencing gross wear.

Inclusive pages

91-98

ISBN/ISSN

1023-8883

Comments

Permission documentation is on file.

Publisher

Springer

Volume

32

Peer Reviewed

yes

Issue

2


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