Some innovative surface texturing techniques for tribological purposes

This paper reviews methods for texturing surfaces for tribological applications and presents some innovative methods that could make surface texturing more cost-effective. Possible texturing methods were identified and classified according to their physical principles. This involved identifying existing texturing methods and also led to proposals for new possible methods. Three innovative texturing methods with low cost and high texturing speed are then presented: (i) a simpler and cheaper version of photochemical texturing, (ii) maskless electrochemical texturing, and (iii) masking surfaces by ink-jet printing followed by etching. From these, maskless electrochemical texturing was the cheapest and fastest, but the minimum size of the texture features was the largest. Ink-jet printing followed by etching is an alternative that may potentially provide a good combination of cost and resolution, but the texturing time depends on the surface area. Then, an attempt was made to delimit tribological applications where the use of such processes could be beneficial, based on analysis of experimental results of their tribological evaluation. These showed that the methods proposed could be particularly suited for components with contact areas larger than the width of the texture features under either hydrodynamic lubrication or starved lubrication.