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Published on: December 24, 2014
The nonlinear nature of friction
Michael Urbakh1, Joseph Klafter, Delphine Gourdon
1School of Chemistry, Raymond and Beverley Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel. urbakh@post.tau.ac.il
Abstract:
Tribology is the study of adhesion, friction, lubrication and wear of surfaces in relative motion. It remains as important today as it was in ancient times, arising in the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, biology and engineering. The more we learn about tribology the more complex it appears. Nevertheless, recent experiments coupled to theoretical modelling have made great advances in unifying apparently diverse phenomena and revealed many subtle and often non-intuitive aspects of matter in motion, which stem from the nonlinear nature of the problem.
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