Research And Development Of The Micro-Friction Tester In Special Environment

In the second half of 20^th century, with the development of large scale integrated circuit technology and micro manufacture technology, the Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) emerged. And the R&D of MEMS has rapidly become the frontier of the mechanical science.The friction of the MEMS interface is of the microscopic scope. Generally the applied loading is less than mN and greater than μN, which is between macroscopic and microscopic measuring scale. However, there is no standard instrument currently appropriate to this measuring scale. For the available equipment's now, the applied forces are either excessively big (such as pin-on-disc and block-ring equipment) or excessively small (such as Atomic Force Microscope). On the other hand, the equipment can't reflect the actual working conditions accurately and the environmental conditions, such as speed, temperature and humidity, all of which have great effects on friction characteristics. Therefore, the friction characteristics cannot be demonstrated completely. Based on the above considerations, we need to design and manufacture a new micro friction testing instrument, it not only can provide a kind of tool for the research of MEMS, but also build a bridge between the micro and macro friction. This makes that the micro and macro friction scales can be hooked up, promotes the development of tribology and provides a foundation for the designing and manufacturing of micro mechanism.In this paper, through the friction & wear experiments performed using computer aided system, the online testing of the friction & wear instrument is carried out utilizing the intelligent instrument. Also, the DAQ card and LabVIEW equipment are employed to implement experiment datum's real-time collection, analysis processing and export function etc.. Hence, we can evaluate the tribology experiments in real time. The present study can radically remove the traditional tribology experiment system's shortcomings that can't reflect the systematic and real-time characteristics of the tribology experiment. Due to its good frequency capability, the system can satisfy with the tribology experiment's real-time requirements, and assure experiment result's accuracy.