Center for Tribology and Coatings receives
federal grant from Department of Defense

by Joe King

The Center for Tribology and Coatings, a not-for-profit entity operated as a partnership between Sugar Grove-based Falex Corp. and the NIU College of Engineering and Engineering Technology has received a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Defense.

The latest grant is in addition to approximately $6 million provided by the Department of Defense last year to create the ROCK project.

The current project will help the development of new testing procedures and innovative ways to reduce friction and wear in military machinery. Ultimately, work done at the center will benefit a broad range of industries, said CEET Dean Promod Vohra, who sits on the CTC board.

Tribology is the study of friction, wear and lubrication of interacting surfaces, such as in bearings and gears. The primary focus of the center is to create new testing protocols and machinery to evaluate new machine part coatings that are too hard to be effectively and efficiently evaluated by existing methods.

The center also will devise ways to test the behavior of coatings in micro-electromechanical systems and in nano-scale devices in which the machinery is so miniscule that lubricants often lose their lubricating properties.

Participating in research at the center are three members of the NIU engineering faculty: Michael Haji-Sheikh, who is working in the area of embedded sensors; Milivoje Kostic, who is studying on nano-fluids; and Ibrahim Abdel-Motaleb, who is working in the field of diamond coatings.

“I am delighted to see our faculty get the opportunity to participate in this type of applied research and to work with a company like Falex, which is considered the industry leader in this field,” Vohra said. “Ultimately, it will benefit our students because the cutting-edge work being done at this center will find its way into the classroom.”

The center eventually will work alongside coating developers such as Argonne National Laboratory and commercial manufacturing companies that will develop and apply the technology to products rapidly.

10-24-05