STLE Section Awards Scholarship to University of Delaware Doctoral Student
The Philadelphia Section of the STLE is pleased to award a scholarship to Arnab Bhattacharjee, a doctoral student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delaware.
Studying asperity scale wear within
multi-asperity contact and investigating onset of macroscale debris generation
are the main goals of Arnab’s research. The outcome of his research will help
to gain fundamental insights aiming to close the gap between nanoscale
and macroscale tribological properties. He has been studying steel-to-steel
contact with and without lubrication as the primary material system especially
because of their industrial importance, along with single crystal MoS2
and Silicon.
Arnab has designed and fabricated a high
precision repositioning tribometer. He can reliably reposition a sample within
any tribometer instrument with a repositioning error on the order of 50 nm
ensuring the same asperity-to-asperity before and after interruption.
Arnab has worked to develop a computational
method to analyze asperity scale wear measurements. This computation technique allows
quantification of asperity scale wear (~ 0.1 µm3 ) and observe the
progression of single asperities within a multi-asperity contact for the very
first time.
His current research (PhD thesis) focuses on
experimentally investigating the role of contact size on the onset of debris
generation and transition of friction force. This work is aimed to provide a
clear understanding about the fundamental reasons behind nano and macro scale
friction and wear disparity as well as to incorporate insights from this study
to increase device (e.g, MEMS) lifespan.