The need to minimize greenhouse gas emissions, ensure energy security, and improve industrial output and competitiveness, have created a growing demand for engineering systems and functional materials with improved energy efficiency and longer lifetime through improved tribological performance. While ionic liquids (ILs), which are salts with tunable composition and melting point below 100ºC, are promising lubricating fluids, their large-scale utilization in tribological applications has been limited by their high cost, corrosiveness, which mostly derives from the fact that common ILs are halogenated, and the lack of understanding of the relationship between IL molecular structure and lubrication performance. This project seeks to understand how the structure of a class of low-cost, eco-friendly, non-corrosive protic ionic liquids (PILs), namely choline amino acid PILs, affects their lubricity.
- Perform literature review
- Carry out experiments
- Analyze results
