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A Canadian team of researchers has developed a method of measuring component wear that doesn't involve radioactive materials.
The measurement and minimization of wear are often central in designing mechanical components. Unfortunately, the very low wear rates that are the most interesting and useful are also those most difficult to measure precisely.
For example, modern, high-efficiency engines have wear rates that are on the order of nanometers/hour. One of the most accurate methods is based on radionuclide techniques that involve using an accelerator to generate a surface region that is radioactive and then measuring the amount of radiation in the lubricant caused by the wear process. This approach is useful for continually measuring wear rates in situ, but obviously there are many environments where using radioactive materials is inconvenient.
A team led by professor Peter Norton at the university of Western Ontario, Canada, recently developed an analogous approach that avoids using radioactivity. This method involves implanting a surface region with gold atoms, (197Au) at energies chosen to match the implantation depth to the desired measurement parameters. For example at 3D keV, gold ions penetrate a few tens of nanometers into ferrous metals and alloys. Rather than using radioactivity to monitor...