PhD Contact Mechanics, Friction and Contact Fatigue on Polymeric Surfaces

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Maria Dumitru
The project deals with friction and wear of polymers. During their lifetime, polymer surfaces are submitted to contact fatigue due to the large number of sliding and/or rolling cycles. Typically semi-crystalline polymers, be it unfilled or reinforced by fillers, are used. Until now friction and wear properties are investigated via the cook-and-look principle, i.e. make the material and see if it performs better.

The aim of this project is to step away from this type of research and improve the knowledge and know-how in the analysis of damage mechanisms for surfaces submitted to friction and wear, firstly for unfilled polymers and in a later stage for filled polymers systems. The project is in collaboration with the Charles Sadron Institute (ICS), Strasbourg, France, i.e. the Physical-Mechanics and Tribology of Polymers (PMTP).



Our part of the project focuses on finite element simulations. The simulations will be used to tailor friction and wear properties based on a polymer’s intrinsic deformation response. Since it is impossible to perform simulations on the macroscopic level with a detail in the order of tens of nanometers, Representative Volume Elements (RVE’s) will be used instead. They reflect the heterogeneous structure of the construct and its corresponding mechanical response. Subsequently, the simulated deformation response from the RVE-level will be implemented on the macroscopic level to mimic the actual sliding friction experiments. The benefit of simulating in this manner is that we have access to local deformations.

Ultimately we would like to propose a local failure criterion, which predicts the onset of wear as observed on the macroscopic level as determined by the underlying micro-/nanostructure and a polymer’s intrinsic properties. More importantly we are striving to develop a toolkit to step away from the aforementioned cook-and-look method and arrive at direct guidelines on how to create polymers with superior friction and wear properties.