Jane Wang – författare

Understanding the characteristics of material contact and lubrication at tribological interfaces is of great importance to engineering researchers and machine designers. Traditionally, contact and lubrication are separately studied due to technical difficulties, although they often coexist in reality and they are actually on the same physical ground. Fast research advancements in recent years have enabled the development and application of unified models and numerical approaches to simulate contact and lubrication, merging their studies into the domain of Interfacial Mechanics.

This book provides updated information based on recent research progresses in related areas, which includes new concepts, theories, methods, and results for contact and lubrication problems involving elastic or inelastic materials, homogeneous or inhomogeneous contacting bodies, using stochastic or deterministic models for dealing with rough surfaces. It also contains unified models and numerical methods for mixed lubrication studies, analyses of interfacial frictional and thermal behaviors, as well as theories for studying the effects of multiple fields on interfacial characteristics. The book intends to reflect the recent trends of research by focusing on numerical simulation and problem solving techniques for practical interfaces of engineered surfaces and materials.

This book is written primarily for graduate and senior undergraduate students, engineers, and researchers in the fields of tribology, lubrication, surface engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering.

This volume developed from a Workshop on Natural Locomotion in Fluids and on Surfaces: Swimming, Flying, and Sliding which was held at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota, from June 1-5, 2010.  The subject matter ranged widely from observational data to theoretical mechanics, and reflected the broad scope of the workshop.  In both the prepared presentations and in the informal discussions, the workshop engaged exchanges across disciplines and invited a lively interaction between modelers and observers.

The articles in this volume were invited and fully refereed. They provide a representative if necessarily incomplete account of the field of natural locomotion during a period of rapid growth and expansion.  The papers presented at the workshop, and the contributions to the present volume, can be roughly divided into those pertaining to swimming on the scale of marine organisms, swimming of microorganisms at low Reynolds numbers, animal flight, and sliding and other related examples of locomotion.