THE ROLE OF SURFACES AND INTERFACES IN WEAR, ADHESION AND BREAKDOWN PHENOMENA

Phenomena of wear, adhesion, dielectric breakdown, etc. are dealt with by specialists in different fields (solid state physics, thermodynamics, mechanics) and it is hard to establish links between the various approaches. We have tried to achieve this by the use of surface methods, taking as the basis the insulating nature of technological surfaces and attempting to relate their technical properties (wear, adhesion, wetting, etc) to their specific physical properties (surface tension, defects, conductivity). Although in principle the physical properties investigated are accessible through chemical analysis, an explanation for the phenomena observed in practice was obtained by study of the elementary phenomena occurring on model surfaces (adsorption, segregation, charges, etc. ). the points of interest were the origin of the coupling which exists between surface properties and volume properties, that of fracto-emission phenomena and that of electrostatic phenomena observed during wear, adhesive stripping, etc.