Friction, Lubrication, and Adhesion

This chapter and the two that follow are introduced at this time to illustrate some of the many extensive areas in which there are important applications of surface chemistry. Friction and lubrication as topics properly deserve mention in a textbook on surface chemistiy, partly because these subjects do involve surfaces directly and partly because many aspects of lubrication depend on the properties of surface films. The subject of adhesion is treated briefly in this chapter mainly because it, too, depends greatly on the behavior of surface films at a solid interface and also because friction and adhesion have some interrelations. Studies of the interaction between two solid surfaces, with or without an intervening liquid phase, have been stimulated in recent years by the development of equipment capable of the direct measurement of the forces between macroscopic bodies. 

Friction can now be probed at the atomic scale by means of atomic force microscopy (AFM) (see Section VIII-2) and the surface forces apparatus (see Section VI-4) these approaches are leading to new interpretations of friction [1,1 a,lb]. The subject of friction and its related aspects are known as tribology, the study of surfaces in relative motion, from the Greek root tribos meaning mbbing. 

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