Mountaire Farms’ agricultural food production and processing facilities near Lumber Bridge, N.C., has its share of heavy, 18-wheeler traffic. The number of vehicles entering and exiting the facilities ...

Friction is hard to predict and control, especially since surfaces that come in contact are rarely perfectly flat. New experiments demonstrate that the amount of friction between two silicon surfaces, ...

Researchers have demonstrated how to entirely suppress static friction between two surfaces. This means that even a minuscule force suffices to set objects in motion. Especially in micromechanical ...

According to the Federal Highway Association (FHWA), over 2.4 million people were injured in vehicle crashes in 2012. Over half of those crashes occurred at roadway curves or intersections where ...

1.1 What is friction? Take this everyday example: when a coffee mug rests on a flat table, the kinetic frictional force is zero. There is no force trying to move the mug across the table, so there is ...

If you want to know how to make a sneaker with better traction in the rain, just ask a snake. That’s the theory driving the research of Hisham Abdel-Aal, PhD, an associate teaching professor from ...

When two solid surfaces come into contact with each other, friction acts to prevent their relative motion, but the ability to reduce this friction to nearly zero is called structural superlubricity.

A recent article published in Advanced Functional Materials investigated the friction behavior of surfaces coated with surface-attached hydrogel layers. These natural synovial-joint structure-inspired ...

I'll be honest—friction is pretty complicated. Imagine that I have a block of wood sliding on a table. In some way, the atoms on the surface of the wood block are interacting with the surface atoms on ...

If you want to reduce the friction between tiny objects, just increase the mass of the atoms at one surface, say researchers in the US. Heavier atoms vibrate at lower frequencies than their lighter ...