Development of sintered bearings with minimal friction losses and maximum life time using infiltrated liquid crystalline lubricants

Sintered bearings are widely used as machine elements due to their low costs in combination with a stable tribological performance. Given the current and future challenge of global conservation of energy and reliability of mechanically systems, the increase of energy efficiency of sintered bearings would have strong effect due to the tremendous number of mechanical devices. The approach of this investigation is to develop a complete system consisting of a lubricant, which is adapted for an optimized sliding bearing. Friction tests with a rotating ball-on-3-plates tribometer (µ~0.005) and an application oriented component test (µ~0.01) show that extremely low friction values can be realized using a liquid-crystalline lubricant in contrast to standard oils.