DLC and Glycerol: Superlubricity in Rolling/Sliding Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication

Low friction is one of the most important parameters for the development of machine components and machines with high efficiency. Many of the common machine components of today such as gears, rolling element bearings and cam-followers are defined by their non-conformal contacts leading to high-contact pressures, typically 1–4 GPa. The lubrication of such contacts is usually called elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL). Diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings and glycerol have individually been shown to produce low friction in boundary, mixed and full film lubrication. A few studies have been conducted using both glycerol and DLC-coated surfaces to achieve even lower friction in pure sliding boundary-lubricated contacts. However, the literature is lacking studies of how the combination of glycerol and DLC performs in non-conformal rolling/sliding contacts where many common machine components operate. Such a study is presented in this article where a ball-on-disc test rig is used to investigate the performance of the combination of DLC and glycerol at pressures up to 1.95 GPa at various entrainment speeds and slide-to-roll ratios. The investigation shows that the DLC-glycerol combination provides very low friction values, in some cases, below the superlubricity threshold of 0.01, possibly shown for the first time at such high pressure in a non-conformal rolling/sliding contact. The low friction mechanism in full film lubrication is a combination of the low pressure-viscosity and high temperature-viscosity sensitivity of glycerol in combination with thermal insulation of the DLC coating and is presented as thermally assisted liquid superlubricity.