Application to Tribological Measurement

Tribology is a study which deals with the friction, wear, and lubrication caused by interaction of surfaces between two contacting materials, and it is one of the indispensable fundamental research fields required for the development of high performance equipment. Of all above, it is very important to evaluate precisely the heat generation by friction of interacting surface and its resultant thermal status, because the phenomenon such as friction or lubrication is closely related to the heat produced by friction. However, since contact surfaces are usually obscured by other objects, there has been no direct measurement method of temperature distribution of interacting surfaces.
Professor Keiji Ogura and Assistant Professor Takahide Sakagami of Osaka University conducted an experiment to directly visualize the thermal status of contact surfaces in a anew method with IR transmitting material and TVS.
This experiment is to measure the interacting surface between IR transmitting material and the object of pin, which contact each other in lubricant contact state, through IR transmitting material, as shown in Fig.1.
Rotating Disk is made of IR transmitting material, such as Industrial Sapphire or Alumina Ceramics. Since IR transmitting material itself does radiate almost no IR, and transmits IR energy produced by the objects behind it quite well, the TVS can measure the temperature distribution for heat generated by the friction between the disk and pin. (Photo 1 to 3) As a result of measurement of the stable temperature distribution produced by the frictional heat at the interacting surface in lubricant contact state, it was made clear that the contact status and its temperature distribution can be precisely evaluated using temperature distribution image.