Here is our final poster for our project.

 

 

Here is an abstract for our project.

Title: Effect of Hardness on Friction and Wear Characteristics of Oil-Based ZnO Nanofluids

Abstract:

Nanofluids are fluids with a suspension of nanoparticles in base fluids. With a growing demand for efficiency and reliability, nanofluids with significant friction reduction and anti-wear properties have been studied extensively. Many different variables have been examined in order to find their effects on friction and wear performance of nanofluids. Those variables include: the surface roughness of a material, the size, shape, and concentration of nanoparticles, and the type of nanoparticles, base fluids and surfactants used. However, the effect of the hardness of a material on friction and wear when using nanofluids as lubricants has not been studied. In this project, pin-on-disk tests with carbon steels of varying hardness alongside ZnO-oil based nanofluids will be carried out to assess the effect of the hardness on friction and wear performance of nanofluids.

 

Here's a photo of us after giving a presentation on our project on Thursday, June 19th. And yes I have finally found which password out of a hundred I used for this account!

This morning we got to do something cool. We took a tour of the Chrysler Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP). This is where the Chrysler 200 is made.

We didn't get to see the whole process like I had hoped, but we did get to see how the car's body is put together and painted.

There were lots of cool robots !

Just and update. We still are doing nothing but polishing, we are averaging an average of one disk per day. We didn't think it would take this long to polish all of our samples.

Also, we are kind of at a standstill since some materials like sanding disks and micro polish have not come in yet. That stuff is supposed to come in soon we hope. We have enough sanding disks to hold us over, but we cant move on without the micro polish.

We hope to at least get our testing parameters set up by the end of the week.

Right now we are preparing an abstract in order to enter the Mid-Sure undergraduate conference at Michigan State University and present our findings.

One, last thing. Sai forgot his password and can't seem to recover it, so I might be doing all of the updates for a while.

Well, so far polishing has proven to be a challenge. The goal is to get the steel cuts to look almost like a mirror. This takes a long time.

We finally got our steel cut to the right specifications last Thursday. Now we need to get the steel pieces ready for testing.
The first step will be to polish the steel pieces.
We also received our nanoparticles.