The subjects of tribology, which is defined as the study of the interaction of solid surfaces in their relative motion, are friction, wear, lubrication, surface properties, and adhesion. Since the term tribology was introduced by Peter H. Jost in 1966,… Read More
Together with our collaborators from Civil Engineering, we are designing new superhydrophobic concrete pavements and we want to ensure that the hydrophobicity (water repellency) does not mean that the pavement is slippery in terms of traction / friction. Pavements and… Read More
Our new paper “Ternary Logic of Motion to Resolve Kinematic Frictional Paradoxes” by Michael Nosonovsky and Alexander D. Breki is published in Entropy 2019, 21(6), 620; https://doi.org/10.3390/e21060620 Abstract Paradoxes of dry friction were discovered by Painlevé in 1895 and caused… Read More
A. Breki and M. Nosonovsky “”Ultraslow frictional sliding and the stick-slip transition,” Appl. Phys Lett. 113 (24) 241602 (2018) DOI: 10.1063/1.5064820 In this paper, we study friction at a very low velocity (37 nm/s), so that we have, in a… Read More
Our new paper A. Breki and M. Nosonovsky “Einstein’s viscosity equation and nanolubricated friction” has been accepted to Langmuir. DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.8b02861 (See also the blog entry “Einstein and nanofriction”.) The generalized Einstein equation for the viscosity of a dispersion/suspension, μ… Read More
Albert Einstein’s 18-pages long doctoral thesis (submitted in July 1905 and published next year in the German journal Annalen der Physik) is his most cited paper. While the objective of Einstein’s work was to determine the size of atoms and… Read More
Prof. Nosonovsky’s article about how modern theories of friction can help engineers is published in the ASME’s “Mechanical Engineering” magazine with the circulation of more than 100,000 hard copies. The article (which was selected for the cover story) discusses such… Read More
This famous Ancient Egyptian painting on Pharaoh (more accurately, Nomarch) Djehutihotep’s tomb (c. 1880 BCE) entered many tribology textbooks as possible evidence of the use of lubrication in Ancient Egypt. Engineers are quite enthusiastic, although Egyptologists are much more skeptical…. Read More
The static friction and the kinetic / dynamic friction are two different phenomena. The coefficient of static friction is always greater than that of the dynamic friction. Therefore, the limit of small sliding velocity (V→0) is different from the case… Read More
Another extremely interesting topic in modern physics, which may be related to the study of friction, is the jamming transition. A granular material can flow through a pipe or it can jam. The transition is abrupt, and some scholars have… Read More
Among many models which explain the Coulomb-Amontons law of friction, an interesting model is based on the damage rheology. Dr. Vladimir Lyakhovsky, whom I visited recently at the Geological Survey of Israel in Jerusalem, has explained to me the details… Read More
My doctoral research (some 15 years ago) was about the Adams (or Adams-Martins) instabilities. We showed that this type of instabilities exists for multiple asperity contacts (modeled as a periodic set of contacts, see, M. Nosonovsky & G. Adams, “Vibration… Read More
Peter Jost (1921-2016) is considered a founder of the Tribology (the study of friction, wear, and lubrication), because the term “tribology” became widely used following the 1966 “Jost Report.” This was a UK governmental report, which stated that friction, wear,… Read More
Dr. Nosonovsky has joint the Program Committee of Workshop on Logics for Unconventional Computing MARCH 15–17, 2017 Below are some thoughts om the subject. Interestingly, friction and other surface phenomena including adhesion, capillarity, and the superhydrophobicity have logical and information… Read More
Про трение как “сопутствующее явление” (“Friction as an epiphenomenon”) is a bit “philosophical” paper in Russian about friction. For most conventional textbooks on mechanics, Coulomb’s dry friction is an external phenomenon, which is introduced in an ad hoc manner in addition… Read More
During my sabbatical year, I am a visiting associate professor in Prof. Jay Fineberg’s group at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is one of the leadings groups in the world in the experimental study of… Read More