Publications by Tobias Brink | EPFL Graph Search

Roughness Evolution Induced by Third-Body Wear

Jean-François Molinari, Tobias Brink, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

Surface roughness is a key factor when it comes to friction and wear, as well as to other physical properties. These phenomena are controlled by mechanisms acting at small scales, in which the topography of apparently flat surfaces is revealed. Roughness i ...

2024

Roughness Evolution Induced by Third-Body Wear (vol 72, 37, 2024) [Correction]

Jean-François Molinari, Tobias Brink

2024

Breakdown of Reye’s theory in nanoscale wear

Jean-François Molinari, Tobias Brink, Antonio Joaquin Garcia Suarez

Building on an analogy to ductile fracture mechanics, we quantify the size of debris particles created during adhesive wear. Earlier work suggested a linear relation between tangential work and wear debris volume, assuming that the debris size is proportio ...

2023

Effect of wear particles and roughness on nanoscale friction

Jean-François Molinari, Enrico Milanese, Tobias Brink

Frictional contacts lead to the formation of a surface layer called the third body, consisting of wear particles and structures resulting from their agglomerates. Its behavior and properties at the nanoscale control the macroscopic tribological performance ...

2022

A Simple Mechanistic Model for Friction of Rough Partially Lubricated Surfaces

Jean-François Molinari, Julie Richard, Tobias Brink, Gianluca Costagliola

We report experimental measurements of friction between an aluminum alloy sliding over steel with various lubricant densities. Using the topography scans of the surfaces as input, we calculate the real contact area using the boundary element method and the ...

2021

A parameter-free mechanistic model of the adhesive wear process of rough surfaces in sliding contact

Jean-François Molinari, Lucas Henri Galilée Frérot, Tobias Brink

In order to develop predictive wear laws, relevant material parameters and their influence on the wear rate need to be identified. Despite decades of research, there is no agreement on the mathematical form of wear equations and even the simplest models, s ...

2021

Adhesive wear and interaction of tangentially loaded micro-contacts

Jean-François Molinari, Son-Jonathan Pham-Ba, Tobias Brink

Current engineering wear models are often based on empirical parameters rather than built upon physical considerations. Here, we look for a physical description of adhesive wear at the microscale, at which the interaction between two surfaces comes down to ...

2020

Role of interfacial adhesion on minimum wear particle size and roughness evolution

Jean-François Molinari, Ramin Aghababaei, Enrico Milanese, Tobias Brink

Adhesion between two bodies is a key parameter in wear processes. At the macroscale, strong adhesive bonds are known to lead to high wear rates, as observed in clean metal-on-metal contact. Reducing the strength of the interfacial adhesion is then desirabl ...

2020

Elastostatic loading of metallic glass-crystal nanocomposites: Relationship of creep rate and interface energy

Tobias Brink

We study the creep behavior of Cu64Zr36 glass-crystal nanocomposites under elastostatic loading conditions in molecular dynamics simulations. By manipulating the glass-crystal interfaces of a precipitation-annealed glass containing Laves-type crystallites, ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2019

Adhesive wear mechanisms in the presence of weak interfaces: Insights from an amorphous model system

Jean-François Molinari, Tobias Brink

Engineering wear models are generally empirical and lack connections to the physical processes of debris generation at the nanoscale to microscale. Here, we thus analyze wear particle formation for sliding interfaces in dry contact with full and reduced ad ...

2019

Emergence of self-affine surfaces during adhesive wear

Jean-François Molinari, Ramin Aghababaei, Enrico Milanese, Tobias Brink

Friction and wear depend critically on surface roughness and its evolution with time. An accurate control of roughness is essential to the performance and durability of virtually all engineering applications. At geological scales, roughness along tectonic ...

Nature Research2019

Asperity-Level Origins of Transition from Mild to Severe Wear

Jean-François Molinari, Ramin Aghababaei, Tobias Brink

Wear is the inevitable damage process of surfaces during sliding contact. According to the well-known Archard’s wear law, the wear volume scales with the real contact area and as a result is proportional to the load. Decades of wear experiments, however, s ...

2018

Adhesive wear mechanisms uncovered by atomistic simulations

Jean-François Molinari, Lucas Henri Galilée Frérot, Ramin Aghababaei, Enrico Milanese, Tobias Brink

In this review, we discuss our recent advances in modeling adhesive wear mechanisms using coarse-grained atomistic simulations. In particular, we present how a model pair potential reveals the transition from ductile shearing of an asperity to the formatio ...

SPRINGEROPEN2018