3 Day Open Conference

Improved wear resistance of polymer-based composites
Wednesday 19th November 2008
16.40 - 17.00
Auditorium 1

Polymeric materials can be scratched easily - as known to everybody who dealt with Teflon. At LAPOM we develop methods of improving scratch and wear resistance and of lowering friction by a variety of means which include creation of blends, microcomposites, nanocomposites, application of magnetic fields and irradiation. We use a variety of techniques to quantify the improvement - including microscratch testing, sliding wear, sled friction, pin-on-disk wear, pin-on-disk friction and Taber abrasion. Transparency is determined with a spherical spectrophotometer. New polymer- based materials with distinctly better tribological properties are thus developed for specific applications.

About the Speaker(s):

Dr Witold Brostow
Director
LAPOM, University of North Texas, USA

LAPOM Director and Regents Prof. of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Brussels, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Mexico City