Tribology and Its Many Facets: From Macroscopic to Microscopic and Nano-scale Phenomena

The key features of tribology – interfacial phenomena of interacting bodies in relative motion – are as origin of friction and wear scientifically interesting and have important applications in technology and engineering. The interfacial interactions have been studied in various theoretical and experimental approaches. Depending on the scope of the investigation and the nature of the tribological solid/fluid/solid or solid/solid system under study, these approaches apply contact mechanics, hydrodynamics, and rheology as well as solid state physics and chemistry. Accordingly, also various experimental techniques have been used, ranging from Coulomb's classical tribometer to the contemporary atomic force microscope.This paper reviews by way of examples some of the basic interfacial facets of tribology – from bulk continuum to atomistic/discrete phenomena – in a macroscopic, microscopic, and nano-scale point of view. For tribo-testing it is important to characterize the tribo-system under study by an appropriate choice of a systems envelope and to consider the hierarchy of interaction levels.