Friction plays a central role in life; in transport, in manufacturing, in process engineering, in medical devices and in everyday human activities yet we still struggle to predict friction in realistic engineering contacts. Understanding the physical and chemical processes at contacting interfaces is the only route to cracking the tribological enigma.
The vision of this Programme Grant is to develop a framework to facilitate the prediction of friction. Through four challenges we aim to make progress in the prediction of friction using advanced cross-cutting methodologies - advanced microscopy, synchrotron techniques, sensor technologies and advancing modelling frameworks.
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The Programme Grant is a collaboration between the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield with 18 Investigators and 8 Postdoctoral staff from both the institutions.

Sheffield team talk Friction at Pint of Science Festival
Several of the University of Sheffield’s research team on the Friction programme grant recently presented talks at the Pint of Science festival. Pint of Science is a grassroots non-profit organisation.. [with…
Read Dr. Wei Pin Goh’s article on the Numerical Analysis of Prevailing Mechanical Stresses Exerted on Particles during Mechanofusion Mixing Using Discrete Element Method
Numerical Analysis of Prevailing Mechanical Stresses Exerted on Particles during Mechanofusion Mixing Using Discrete Element Method What is Mechanofusion? Mechanofusion is a dry powder coating process that utilises mechanical…
Listen to Professor Roger Lewis on BBC Radio 4 discussing leaves on the line why it is such a problem.
Listen to Professor Roger Lewis on The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry on BBC Radio 4 in which they discuss how tribology affects us in our everyday lives, including…