The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide industrial lubricant companies or automotive lubricant companies with a better understanding and a design strategy for new lubricant products, especially for high-loading, ultra-thin film lubrications. It has been predicted that three major economic areas are related to tribology and lubrication engineering -- energy, manufacturing and transportation. These three areas all follow a trend towards increasing the efficiency, in which lubricants or new lubricant formulations are a critical component in an intense competition to provide goods at the lowest costs. This market pressure will continue to create a demand for new machinery and new type of lubricants that can improve the efficiency of manufacturing operations.
The project builds a bridge that connects research findings in the computational lab to the real industrial world. Commercial importance for the lubricant products is a significant energy and cost savings in many sectors and new enabling technologies. The project also provides a unique opportunity for students to practice computational nano-tribology and research commercialization training in the real world, benefiting the lubricant industry, environment, and society.
This I-Corps project uses core technology and innovation of computational molecular simulations to understand and design new lubricant products. Synthetic base oils with different viscosity modifiers under high loadings are targeted. The project explores the commercial opportunity of simulation technology through collaboration with potential customer lubricant companies. So far the nanoscale mechanical behaviors of base oils in boundary lubrication are still not well understood. This project focuses on atomic-scale friction behavior of realistic lubricant oils with/without additives and develops new computational models to provide unique insights into the atomistic behaviors of lubricants under compression and shear in boundary lubrication. Through collaboration with potential industry customers, computational molecular simulations reveal the fundamental lubricant-surface interactions under extreme boundary lubrication conditions. This project creates a new frontier for the advancement in tribology and lubrication engineering while meeting current customer needs. In addition, there is a commercialization potential to attract industrial partners to develop the next-generation lubricants for industrial and automotive lubricant companies.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
