I'll be honest—friction is pretty complicated. Imagine that I have a block of wood sliding on a table. In some way, the atoms on the surface of the wood block are interacting with the surface atoms on ...

Irregularities present on a surface are often described as surface roughness or texture. These surface textures such as grooves and dimples impart friction, which is the force between two sliding ...

A research team led by Prof. Tian-Bao Ma from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tsinghua University has proposed a novel strategy to reduce friction and wear by inducing dynamic electronic ...

Schematic illustration of Friction Force Microscopy (FFM). The AFM cantilever, a small diving board-like structure about 200 micrometers long, 50 micrometers wide, and 1 micrometer thick, has a sharp ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

A popular brand of angel hair pasta is helping researchers experimentally to understand the friction forces that occur in an earthquake fault and providing better information than current numerical ...