Abstract
Water lubrication is one of the candidates of the tribo-system with low negative environmental impact. It is well known that silicon based ceramics show excellent tribological properties under lubrication with water. The characteristic improvement was attempted by giving texturing to the silicon nitride surface so that the water lubrication might spread as a representative of the ecotribology system. The laser surface texturing (LST) showed the friction reducing effect under the sliding condition of the low bearing characteristic number. The mechanism of the triblogical property improvement by the LST method was discussed based on the experiment results and the surface analytical results.
