Symposium on Tribology: Understanding Friction, Lubrication and Wear Across the Scales; Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany; October 4-8, 2010

The objective of this award is to provide partial travel support for researchers from the United States working in the area of tribology to attend and give invited presentations at the Fifth Conference on Multiscale Materials Modeling Conference 2010, which will be held in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, October 4-8, 2010. The title of the symposium in which they will present their work is "Tribology: Understanding Friction, Lubrication and Wear across the Scales." Deliverables include planned conference proceedings from the symposium that will be published in the European Physical Journal. This symposium will form a unique platform that unites modelers and experimentalists to discuss the opportunities and challenges multiscale modeling offers for all kind of tribological issues. This will benefit the field because the performance of macroscale machines is governed by a variety of nanoscale mechanical and chemical processes at moving interfaces. This makes tribology - the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion - inherently multiscale. Consequently, modeling utilizes the complete MMM toolbox including electronic structure calculations, molecular dynamics, mesoparticle methods and continuum mechanics in order to study the underlying chemical, mechanical and fluidic processes on all length scales. It is anticipated that the unique focus of the symposium on the multiscale aspects of tribology will enhance scientific understanding of the field.