| Abstract |
Wear of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS)/microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) involves a limited number of superficial atomic layers. In larger components, where tolerances and surface roughness are usually quite small, wear also occurs essentially in a narrow near-surface region, with not more than few hundreds nanometres. Therefore, in general, macromechanical approaches to wear are not strictly applicable. In spite of the increasing effort, which has been made in the last two decades in this research field, there is still an evident gap between the approach of physicists to atomic wear phenomena and that of materials and mechanical engineers to microscale and mesoscale wear. This article presents an overview on the actual knowledge of the fundamentals of hard materials wear mechanisms, focused in the phenomenology that occurs from the atomic scales upto the scale of some tens of nanometres, aiming to contribute to bridge this gap of comprehension involving the wear at nanometric scales. |
