Facilities - Tribology & Surface Engineering Lab

Lubricant Tribometer: This home designed machine can conduct dry and lubricated tests for evaluating tribological performances of bulk materials, coatings as well as lubricants. A ball is slid over a cylindrical shaft and the contact is that of a point contact. Very low to high contact stresses can be generated.

Pin-on-Disk machine: Pin on disk is design to conduct low load sliding tests. The normal load can be varied from 50 g to 500 g. There is flexibility in changing the load cells for low and high load experiments.

Dip-coater: This home designed machine can be used for coating polymer or lubricants on a specimen with uniform thickness. The specimen of any geometry can be dip-coated. The coating material must be able to be dissolved in a solvent or should have low viscosity for uniform thickness.

Spin-coater: This is used to form very thin coating of polymers on flat surfaces. For example, SU-8 can be coated onto Si wafer using this machine. The spinning speed controls the thickness of the film if the viscosity is kept constant.

Micro Balance:

It’s capable of making precise measurements of weight of objects of relatively small mass: of the order of a million parts of a gram (precision to 0.1 milligrams).

Magentic stirrer:

It is used to cause a stir bar immersed in a liquid to spin very quickly, agitating or mixing the liquid. It also includes with a provision for heating the liquid.

3D Optical Profilometer:
3D Optical Profiler from BRUKER are Vertical Scanning Interferometry (VSI)/Phase System Interferometry (PSI) system, able to fast, non-contact, high-precision 3D metrology of nano surface features and textures.

Ultrasonicator:
It is used for cleaning/mixing of different substrate which uses ultrasound (20–400 kHz). The ultrasound can be used with just water.