Classical EHL Versus Quantitative EHL: A Perspective Part II—Super-Arrhenius Piezoviscosity, an Essential Component of Elastohydrodynamic Friction Missing from Classical EHL

Abstract

Ninety years of high-pressure measurements with many different types of viscometers have shown that faster-than-exponential (super-Arrhenius) pressure dependence of viscosity is universal for glass-forming liquids and, therefore, all typical liquid lubricants. Dielectric spectroscopy at elevated pressure also yields super-Arrhenius response in the dependence on pressure of the primary relaxation time. In contrast, classical elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) has gone to great lengths to ignore this phenomenon, including fictional accounts of the results of viscometry. As a result of this, classical EHL is unable to quantitatively account for one of the most important properties affecting friction at low sliding velocity, the low-shear viscosity. Differences in friction between similar liquids at low sliding velocity can be explained by their different inflection pressures. Some observed liquid response to shear stress at high pressure can be explained with the measured super-Arrhenius pressure dependence. It should be clear that, had classical EHL employed realistic pressure dependence of viscosity from its beginning, the field would have been in a better position today to solve engineering problems which involve the differences among molecular structures.