Lubricating Characteristic of Grease Composites with CNT Additive

Abstract

The friction at high speed and high pressure tends to cause the lowering of grease stickiness because the frictional heating occurs at the sliding surface, which will bring to the degradation of lubricity. In order to improve the lubricity, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which has excellent heat conductivity, was added as an additive into the different types of greases. Two kinds of the CNTs, which were synthesized by a floating catalyst method at different annealing temperatures, were used. The sliding experiments were conducted to study the tribological performance of the grease composites by varying the added amounts of CNTs and were compared to the original greases. As a result, it was found that the CNTs improved both the friction and the wear properties. The optimum content of the CNTs in the grease composites was 0.3 mass%.