Tribological Research Of Graphene And Graphene Oxide

Reducing energy and material losses in moving mechanical systems due to friction and wear still remains one of the greatest study projects with the increasing scales of the transportation and industry. Great progress in decreasing friction and wear of contacted surfaces had been made when new materials and tribological theory were found. Graphene, a new two-dimensional material, has attracted attentions due to its excellent physical and chemical performances. And its outstanding abilities in tribology has been known.In this paper we focused on the tribological behavior of graphene and graphene oxide. We researched the tribological abilities of graphene at both micro-scale and macro-scale. And we had proved the great performances of graphene and graphene oxide in tribology at micro-scale and macro-scale by experiments. At micro-scale single-layer graphene and fewlayer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition both had great lubrication performance and offered low friction on contacted surfaces. Graphene oxide preformed poorer than the graphene and had higher friction in experiment due to more defects and folding formed on the surface. However its lubricant ability was still good. At macro-scale, graphene and graphene oxide both shown their abilities against wear and low friction when they were sliding under high pressure compared to bare steel flat without any protection. However they have different emphasis of abilities, which graphene shown more about its long wear life and graphene oxide had better lubricating performance. Besides, we found an excellent lubricant by simply stacking these two films and its tribological properties were greatly improved compared to that of these two materials.