| AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Biomaterial Interfaces Division | Thursday Sessions |
| Session BI-ThA |
| Session: | Biolubrication and Wear / Women in Bio-surface Science |
| Presenter: | Xavier Banquy, Universite de Montreal, Canada |
| Authors: | X. Banquy, Universite de Montreal, Canada J. Faivre, Universite de Montreal, Canada G. Xie, Carnegie Mellon University M. Olszewski, Carnegie Mellon University L. David, Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon I T. Delair, Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon I G. Sudre, Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon I A. Montembault, Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon I K. Matyjaszewski, Carnegie Mellon University R. Shrestha, Universite de Montreal, Canada |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
The coming end of earth's fossil energy is pressing humanity to develop more efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. Control of wear and fatigue of machine parts has become one of the most important field of research to meet the outstanding energy crisis the world is currently facing. The design of lubricating fluids able to protect surfaces against wear and high friction has been one the several tools used by engineers to improve machines’ life time and decrease energy consumption. Inspired by many different biological systems that can resist fatigue wear for decades such as our synovial joints, different coating/lubricating technologies involving polymer brushes either in their molecular form or grafted on the surface have emerged. All these strategies require the lubricating or wear protecting molecules to be strongly anchored to the surfaces in order to avoid close contact between the surfaces. Strong anchoring of molecules on surfaces requires a good knowledge of the chemistry and the structure of the surface which complicates dramatically the translation of these technologies towards industrial settings.
We will describe our efforts in the design of lubricating and wear protecting fluids based on synergistic mixtures of bottle brushes (BB) and linear polymer solutions that mimic human synovial fluid. Individually, these two polymers exhibit poor wear protecting capabilities compared to saline solutions. Mixture of the two polymers in pure water or in saline allows to drastically increase wear protection of surfaces under a wide range of shearing conditions. We demonstrate that this synergy between the BB and linear polymer emerges from a strong, yet transient, cohesion between the two components forming the boundary film due to entanglements between both polymers. We show that this concept can be applied to other types of linear polymers and surfaces and is independent of the chemical and mechanical properties of the surfaces. We further extended this approach by engineering different types of molecular interactions between the BB polymer and the linear partner and showed that wear protection can be finely tuned independently of the lubricating properties of the mixture. Different applications of these materials will be described in the biomedical field.