Wear Protection without Surface Modification Using a Synergistic Mixture of Molecular Brushes and Linear Polymers

We describe the design of lubricating and wear protecting fluids based on mixtures of bottle-brushes (BB) and linear polymer solutions. To illustrate this concept, we used hyaluronic acid (HA), a naturally occurring linear polyelectrolyte, and a water-soluble synthetic BB polymer. Individually, these two polymers exhibit poor wear protecting capabilities compared to that of saline solutions. Mixture of the two polymers in pure water or in saline allows the wear protection of surfaces over a wide range of shearing conditions to drastically increase. We demonstrate that this synergy between the BB and HA polymers emerges from a strong cohesion between the two components forming the boundary film due to entanglements between both polymers. We show that this concept can be applied to other types of linear polymers and surfaces and is independent of the chemical and mechanical properties of the surfaces.