Nuclear methods for tribology

The tribological field of activity is mainly concerned with the relative movement of different machine components, friction and wear phenomena and their dependence upon lubrication. Tribological studies on friction and wear processes are important because they lead to significant parameter-improvements of engineering tools and machinery components. A review of fundamental aspects of both friction and wear phenomena is presented. A number of radioindicator-based methods have been known for almost four decades, differing mainly with respect to the mode of introducing the radio-indicators into the machine part to be studied. All these methods briefly presented in this paper are based on the measurement of the activity of wear products and therefore require high activity levels of the part. For this reason, such determinations can be carried out only in special laboratories and under conditions which do not usually agree with the conditions of actual use. What is required is a sensitive, fast method allowing the determination of wear under any operating conditions, without the necessity of stopping and disassembling the machine. The above mentioned requirements are the features that have made the Thin Layer Activation technique (TLA) the most widely used method applied in wear and corrosion studies in the last two decades. The TLA principle, taking in account that wear and corrosion processes are characterised by a loss of material, consists in an ion beam irradiation of a well defined volume of a machine part subjected to wear. The radioactivity level changes can usually be measured by gamma-ray spectroscopy methods. A review of both main TLA fields of application in major laboratories abroad and of those performed at the U-120 cyclotron of I.P.N.E.-Bucharest together with the existing trends to extend other nuclear analytical methods to tribological studies is presented as well. (author). 25 refs., 6 figs., 2 tabs