About a decade ago, group of scientists and engineers gathered in a Las Vegas convention center to discuss how tribological solutions could help the US mitigate the energy crisis. Over the next two days, more than thirty experts—professors who led cutting-edge academic laboratories and tribologists who worked for national labs and in industry—met to explore how much energy could be saved by reducing wear and friction. They called this workshop “Can Tribology Save a Quad?”
A quad is one quadrillion (1015) British thermal units (BTU), a measure of energy roughly equivalent to the energy produced by 183 million barrels of petroleum. The task at hand was to figure out how tribology could save the equivalent of those 183 million barrels of oil annually. By the end of the workshop, the participants had surpassed their goal, identifying up to twenty quads of energy savings. To put this in perspective, we currently burn about twenty million barrels of petroleum a day in the United States. A saving of twenty quads is nearly equivalent to half a year’s worth of petroleum.
After the workshop, the committee shared an online survey with tribologists around the world, asking for their thoughts on how tribology could save more energy. The survey received hundreds of responses from tribologists across the field, in academia and industry. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of soliciting responses to an online survey, then you know this is an enviable response rate for such a specialized topic. It is a testament to how much passion the tribology community has for the subject of energy conservation.
You have already reaped the benefits of this workshop. Automobiles have gotten larger and heavier, yet somehow fuel efficiency has improved. It used to be that about one third of the fuel put into a car was spent overcoming friction. Guess how that mpg rating has improved? We lowered the friction in just about every part of your car, from under the hood to the aerodynamic design of the body, to the materials in the tire.
With the advances already made in our cars, and the possibilities that extend to our global energy consumption, it’s no surprise that friction continues to be a hot research topic. Beyond the more traditional applications of friction in machinery, we’re discovering the role friction plays in infections. The ejection velocity of a bacteria or virus will depend on friction, and that velocity determines if the infection is latent or not. At the other end of the spectrum, the gravitational interactions of bodies in space produces a type of friction that helped researchers indirectly detect dark matter. When they studied stars orbiting around black holes, the calculated orbital times didn’t match up until friction from dark matter was included. But we still don’t know everything about friction. What happens at the quantum level? A hotly debated topic, but one I’m confident will be elucidated in the years to come.
