The results of tribological tests help to optimize material selection, improve product quality and service life, reduce costs and develop clear competitive advantages. The practical data obtained enables design engineers to make informed decisions and offer their customers high-performance, reliable products. This blog article deals with the tribological testing methods used, why big data means a lot but not everything, the advantages for plastics processing companies and, above all, the role of the material developer or compounder:

When the keywords "high performance" or "all-rounder" are mentioned, the air is generally thin - at the latest, this is where the wheat begins to separate from the chaff. This applies all the more to plastics and polymers in tribological applications. When speeds, pressure ratios, operating times or temperatures in sliding or ball bearings, for example, increase massively, when the requirements for sliding friction properties and the expectations for TCO optimization grow at the same time, and when the performance capabilities of standard plastics such as POM, PBT or polyamides reach their limits - then high-performance polymer-based compounds come into play.

What at first sounds like squaring the circle, however, ultimately describes "only" the work of a really good plastics compounder: to always condense the unique, specific solution for the respective requirement from an almost unlimited number of potential solution options/tribological plastic compounds. Namely, exactly the plastic compound that contributes significantly to a convincing intermediate or end product - from all decisive points of view. Since these products are mostly invisible in everyday life, we will focus on them here today: The different areas of application for tribological plastic compounds.

What is easy to speak, often difficult to understand, is thousands of years old and today more relevant than ever? The tribology! In a nutshell, this is about the theory of friction (from ancient Greek tribein, meaning to rub/wear off and lógos, here meaning teaching). In the truest sense of the word, everything here revolves around the topics of wear, lubrication and lots of physics, chemistry and mechanical engineering. But one by one. Here is a short introduction with the 5 most important facts: