Electrostatics of lubricants with purely metallic nanoparticle- additives

In the systems with one or two metallic substrates and purely metallic nano-particles in a lubricant, there exists a preferential direction orthogonal to the substrate surface. This leads to the existence of dipole-dipole type interactions between the nano-particles and electric double layer of the substrates. Such a problem sometimes referred to as triboelectrochemical and related here to interactions of the double electric layer with an ensemble of purely metallic nanoparticles and aimed thereby to reduce friction and wear has never been considered before. The electrostatic model of this interaction has been built, analyzed and shown to be potentially capable of producing rather big magnitudes under special conditions. Lubricants with purely metallic nanoparticles are characterized by reduced dielectric permittivity. Therefore, surface protective films with metallic nano-particles embedded tend to island (discontinuous) films well-known to provide rather big magnitudes for such interactions what can be potentially used to reduce friction and wear. The corrosion-related context due to possible origination of galvanic pairs, depending on the nanoparticle nature is not to ignore in applications.