Abstract
Graphene is a promising material as a lubricant additive for reducing friction and wear. Here, a dispersing method which combines chemical modification of graphene by octadecylamine and dicyclohexylcarbodiimide with a kind of effective dispersant has been successfully developed to achieve the remarkable dispersion stability of graphene in base oil. The stable dispersion time of modified graphene (0.5 wt%) with dispersant (1 wt%) in PAO-6 could be up to about 120 days, which was the longest time reported so far. At the same time, the lubricant exhibits a significant improvement of tribological performance for a steel ball to plate tribo-system with a normal load of 2 N. The coefficient of friction between sliding surfaces was ~0.10 and the depth of wear track on plate was ~21 nm, which decreased by about 44% and 90% when compared to pure PAO-6, respectively. Furthermore, the analysis of the lubricating mechanisms in regard to the sliding-induced formation of nanostructured tribo-film has been contacted by using Raman spectra and TEM.
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The work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51527901 and 51335005).
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Pu WU. He received his bachelor degree in mechanical engineering in 2014 from Tsinghua University, Beijng, China. After then, he was a Ph.D. student in the State Key Laboratory of Tribology at the same university. He has recently obtained his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering at Tsinghua University in 2019. His research interests include tribological properties of graphene and tribometer with high vacuum and low temperature.
Chenhui ZHANG. He received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2004. From then, he worked at the State Key Laboratoty of Tribology at Tsinghua. From February 2011 to August 2011, he was invited to Luleå University of Technology in Sweden as a visiting scholar. Then he was invited to Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel as a visiting scientist from February 2012 to January 2013. His current position is a professor at Tsinghua University. His research areas cover surface coatings technology and lubrication theory. His current research interest focuses on the superlubricity.
Jiyang ZHANG. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Beihang University, Beijing, China, in 1992, 1999, and 2015, respectively. He is currently a senior researcher at Beijing Institute of Control Engineering. His research areas cover the spacecraft actuator design and the application of superlubricity.
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Wu, P., Chen, X., Zhang, C. et al. Modified graphene as novel lubricating additive with high dispersion stability in oil. Friction 9, 143–154 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-019-0359-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-019-0359-2