2019 Scholarship Winner Feature – Arnab Bhattacharjee

STLE Section Awards Scholarship to University of Delaware Doctoral Student

L to R: Scholarship Committee Members Thomas O’Brien and Salvatore Rea, Scholarship Awardee Arnab Bhattacharjee, and Professor David Burris

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.