Publisher's Synopsis
In today's scenario, mankind has to deal with significant problems and issues in the next couple of decades. Living in a world with a continuously increasing population and thus energy demand as well as dramatic changes in the global environment with increasing temperatures (global warming) asks for reasonable and sustainable solution strategies to tackle these global and impactful topics. Potential ways to improve these problems may make use of multi-disciplinary approaches unifying different engineering disciplines, physics, chemistry, biology, social sciences among others. Regarding the continuously increasing energy demand, a key aspect in the near future will be to improve the energy efficiency of processes, systems and/or individual components. In this context, tribological problems and issues have to be considered since they greatly downgrade the overall efficiency by wasting a significant amount of energy to overcome friction and wear. The importance and significance of tribological problems becomes evident when considering the fact that every system or component contains moving parts (certain velocity and normal load/pressure) in which frictional processes occur. Due to the number of individual components suffering from frictional losses, this gives a tremendous potential for further improvement.
