Diamond is the hardest known material, but even diamond slowly wears when sliding against other hard surfaces. Surprisingly, recent research suggests that this wear may not simply depend on how far a surface slides, but also on how often the contact breaks and reforms.

Work Activities

In this project, you will test this idea by performing precision sliding experiments between diamond-coated spheres and silicon nitride surfaces (see reference below). By changing the stroke length of the sliding motion while keeping the total sliding distance the same, you will control how frequently the contact is renewed. If contact renewal indeed accelerates wear, shorter strokes should cause the diamond surface to degrade faster.

You will carry out experiments using a high-precision tribometer and analyze the diamond surface before and after sliding with atomic force microscopy, allowing you to measure nanometer-scale wear. The experiments will be performed in a cont...