TLT: What is the significance of scientific and engineering education to future tribologists?
Chung: Tribologists have to solve problems occurring in engineering systems, always under constraint of various sorts. Solving problems is more than firefighting. If threads are being stripped from a jackscrew during service, a tribologist should immediately realize that either the alloy chosen for the jackscrew is not appropriate or the applied stress exceeds specification, or lubrication is not done properly. Having the required science and engineering training provides the knowledge base and analytical skills to understand the problem and, more important, develop solutions to prevent this problem from ever occurring again.

At the same time, as we push for better performance under more extreme conditions, engineering systems are subjected to conditions not encountered previously. One can no longer develop new systems or components to meet these challenges by simply consulting a handbook, database or software. The best materials to use, the most appropriate surface treatment or optimal lubricant packages are not there to be found. Future tribologists have no choice but to operate in a landscape never encountered before. Having a solid foundation in science and engineering provides the skill set to boldly go where no one has gone before.

TLT: To what extent does the field today remain the same as in the early 1980s when you started your career in tribology, and to what extent is it different?
Chung: Back in the good old days (1970s-1980s), the primary home of tribology was mechanical engineering. During those days, one worried about contact stresses and lubricant film thicknesses under different loading and speed conditions. Computers were getting powerful enough that one could deal with complex contact geometries, including the effects of asperities. ZDDP was widely used, but the mechanism of its antiwear property was not yet known. Surface science was getting noticed and applied for fundamental investigations. Thanks to Moore’s Law not only for computing power but also memory and storage, molecular dynamics simulation began to take hold as a credible tool for tribology and other research investigations. Based on the Jost report, we emphasized how important tribology was to the national economy and why more research funding should be provided to encourage interdisciplinary research and that there should be more industry-university cooperation. These efforts, I am sure, must have played a role in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s decision in setting up a new research program in tribology.

Fast forward 30-40 years, we are seeing tribology research flourishing not only in mechanical engineering but also materials science, physics and chemistry. Collaboration in this field is now common practice, and there is no shortage of examples of industry-university cooperation. Of course, academics continue the same line of argument that a good fraction of GDP is lost due to incomplete understanding and application of tribology and that more research funding should be provided. 

In a twist of irony, the increased collaboration in this field blurs disciplinary boundaries, and tribology has somehow lost its identity. Although many government funding agencies continue to fund tribology research, tribology no longer has a unique home. For example, the U.S. National Science Foundation does not have a single tribology program anymore; rather, tribology receives funding through programs in materials research, chemistry and surface engineering. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing—it’s the funding agency’s way of telling us we have to move beyond our comfort zone and get fully engaged with other disciplines. 

We are now blessed with the availability of sophisticated testing equipment, characterization tools and computational resources that one could not have dreamed of 40 years ago. At the same time, we are seeing far too many hypes today. Back in the late 1980s, the magnetic storage community began to make a conscious R&D effort to massively increase the storage density of disk drives, which at the time have protective overcoat thickness of about 30 nm and flying heights on the same order. The terms nanotechnology and nanotribology hadn’t been invented yet, but the folks in that community were already solving problems in the nanoscale and were amazingly successful at it! Today we are seeing far too many nano-this and nano-that, which really make me cringe at times. 

TLT: You mentioned the various disciplines involved in tribology. How will this impact the future of tribology education and research?
Chung: All of us came into tribology through individual disciplines. Since Mother Nature knows no disciplinary boundaries, we in academia have to encourage our students to be exposed to other subject matters related to tribology, through courses, seminars or just talking with experts in the field. At the same time, it may be a cliché, but we don’t know what we don’t know. After all, interesting discoveries are often made at intersections between disciplines. 

Some 35 years ago I had a chance encounter with STLE Life Member professor Herbert Cheng from our mechanical engineering department. I was doing research in surface science and catalysis at that time, while Cheng was already well known in contact mechanics and elastohydrodynamic lubrication. The encounter channeled me into tribology and led to research and education collaboration among myself, Cheng and many colleagues in tribology and other disciplines that continues today. Collaboration with colleagues in multiple disciplines is not only the way to make new discoveries but also allows us to go into fields that we dare not on our own. More important, it’s a lot more fun that way.


Yip-Wah Chung and his doctorate student, Yao Du, in the process of placing a substrate into the load lock for transfer into a sputter-deposition system, in preparation for coating deposition.

TLT: You talked about the importance of collaboration in tribology. Is tribology unique in this aspect? 
Chung: Collaboration is important in most endeavors; tribology is no exception. The unique aspect in tribology is that our challenges and opportunities are systems related. Very often problems in these systems are intertwined and cannot be easily dissected into neat, little stand-alone packages. When CVD diamond emerged from research labs to the commercial world some 30 years ago, it was thought to displace the venerable titanium nitride coatings and be the answer to wear problems in ferrous alloys. The reality is not so straightforward; diamond doesn’t grow on steels. Even if diamond were to grow on steel, adhesion would be a problem because of the large mismatch in the coefficient of thermal expansion. 

The same goes with the formulation of lubricants. A high-performance lube package that works well for steels will likely work poorly for aluminum, titanium or coated ferrous alloys. The tight coupling among problems in a tribo-engineering system makes collaboration and sharing of insight not an option but a standard operating procedure in our field.

However, the emphasis on collaboration can be overplayed. At the working level, most of us tend to do better in small teams. Having bigger or more teams may help cross-fertilization of ideas, but there may be a point of diminishing returns. Funding agencies usually require large university centers to do more than research, imposing various bureaucratic requirements and overhead in their operations. 

TLT: Apart from disciplinary subjects in tribology, what else should modern education and training curriculum incorporate for future tribologists?
Chung: Some years ago an alumnus (who worked in the industry) told me that three-quarters of his time, perhaps more, was involved in communications-related activities—writing reports, meetings and presentations. Pause—please think about this for a moment: all the technical things we talked about earlier only account for less than one-quarter of his work day! Doesn’t it make sense to devote a good portion of academic training to building communication skills? 

Writing well is beyond perfect spelling and grammar. It is the clear and logical presentation of ideas, results and analysis, articulated in easily digestible sentences and standard terminologies. 

Lamenting over the proliferation of PowerPoint in conference presentations, my former doctorate advisor professor Gabor Somorjai once told me that PowerPoint has created 100 new ways to present a talk—badly. I must confess that on more than one occasion, I walked out in the middle of someone’s presentation in a conference. Stuffing a graph with 10 plots and almost invisible legends is a surefire way to lose the audience, and so is the speaker who rams through 60 slides in 15 minutes. The same goes with high-information-density slides visible only from the front row. Or what about the theoretician who displays rows of equations without defining a single symbol? How about the mumbling speaker whose words get barely two meters beyond his mouth? I can go on and on, but you get the picture. Doing a good presentation requires much forethought, preparation of the media and consideration of the audience. Reading through a collection of PowerPoint slides just doesn’t cut it!

TLT: Any closing thoughts?
Chung: With the publish or perish mentality, we in academia sometimes focus too much on getting the research done and not enough on full-person training of graduate students. Let me cite a recent interview of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, during a visit to his alma mater, University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He mentioned three leadership attributes Microsoft would like to see in job candidates: the ability to create clarity when none exists, a knack for sparking energy and an ability to succeed in “an over-constrained space.” 

My immediate reaction is, “Wow, wouldn’t I like to have these folks on my team?” I submit that these attributes can be trained and nurtured. Before you ask how, I would quote what my late colleague professor Morrie Fine used to say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Leadership training is prevalent in the world of business. We just have to be willing to take a little detour, learn how other people do it and adapt it to our profession. This might even be fun.

You can reach Yip-Wah Chung at ywchung@northwestern.edu.