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The nonlinear nature of friction

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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Figure 1: Three theoretical approaches to model friction.
Figure 2: Examples of complex tribological effects of friction forces.
Figure 3: Reduction of friction and stick–slip by mechanical excitations.
Figure 4: Two examples of friction and lubrication forces in living systems.

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Acknowledgements

The experimental work was done under a DOE grant; M.U. and J.K acknowledge discussions and collaboration with A. E. Filippov.

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Correspondence to Michael Urbakh.

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Urbakh, M., Klafter, J., Gourdon, D. et al. The nonlinear nature of friction. Nature 430, 525–528 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02750

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