For machines with mechanical elements, friction is an unavoidable enemy. It is a major source of service failure and can reduce the lifespan of any machinery, from bicycles and cars to airplanes and ...

Conventional car brakes are built with one thing in mind, the purpose of stopping the car. Since this purpose is essential, a great deal of time and resources were invested in the evolution of such ...

Whenever you are trying to design a micromechanical system, it is likely to include the fundamental machine parts of gears, gimbals, hinges, pistons and suspended beams that flex. Brian Borovsky, ...

It makes sense to think that reducing the friction in an engine, transmission, axle, and transfer case, will result in more power available to the wheels. While correct in theory, several industry ...

Although robotic devices are used in everything from assembly lines to medicine, engineers have a hard time accounting for the friction that occurs when those robots grip objects - particularly in wet ...

Friction is hard to predict and control, especially since surfaces that come in contact are rarely perfectly flat. New experiments demonstrate that the amount of friction between two silicon surfaces, ...

When tectonic plates move, they rarely do so smoothly. Sometimes they slide almost imperceptibly; at other times, stress is ...

(Nanowerk News) An interdisciplinary research team of the Institutes of Physical Chemistry and Physics of the University of Freiburg and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt-am-Main has ...