Abstract
Superlubricity has recently raised an increasing interest owing to its great potential in energy saving and environmental benefits. Yet how to obtain stable superlubricity under an ultrahigh contact pressure (>1 GPa) still remains a challenge. Here, we demonstrate that robust liquid superlubricity can be realized even under a contact pressure of 1193 MPa by lubrication with partially oxidized black phosphorus (oBP) nanosheets. The analysis indicates that the oBP nanosheets that absorb large amounts of water molecules are retained at the friction interface and transform the friction pairs interface to that between the oBP nanosheets. Molecular dynamics simulation demonstrates that water molecules could be retained at the friction interface even under the ultrahigh contact pressure owing to the abundant P=O and P–OH bonds formed on the oBP nanosheet surfaces, contributing to the achievement of stable superlubricity under the ultrahigh contact pressure. This work has the potential of introducing the liquid superlubricity concept in diverse industrial applications involving high-contact-pressure operating conditions.
Highlights
Superlubricity, a state in which friction completely or nearly vanishes between the contacting surfaces in relative motion, is highly desirable for energy savings, environmental protection, and enhancement of the lifetime of mechanical components[1,2,3]
The Black phosphorus (BP) powder used was prepared through the high-energy ball-milling technique by using red phosphorus (RP) as the starting material
The typical morphologies, X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns and Raman spectra of the obtained BP and raw RP powders are shown in Supplementary Fig. 1
Summary
Superlubricity, a state in which friction completely or nearly vanishes between the contacting surfaces in relative motion, is highly desirable for energy savings, environmental protection, and enhancement of the lifetime of mechanical components[1,2,3]. The contact pressures in the above systems could satisfy some of the applications (such as human-made joints), the attempts to obtain stable superlubricity under a higher contact pressures in consideration of the widespread high-contact-pressure operating conditions in industrial applications are required[18,22] To this end, many researches focused on accomplishing liquid superlubricity at high-contact pressures, but the contact pressures used in these studies have rarely been over 300 MPa2,18–22. The feature peaks of the BP crystal are the superlubricity mechanism is an essential milestone toward the detected in the XRD patterns of oBP nanosheets, the establishment of liquid superlubricity systems under ultrahigh intensities of the feature peaks are relatively weak, compared with contact pressures
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