Abstract
Nakamori et al. found experimentally that the friction between a partly polished diamond coating and a metal surface was drastically reduced to zero as relative speed increased to a few m/s. [Diamond Relat. Mater., 14, (2005), 2122]. It seems that diamond coating took off the counter surface because sliding was noiseless in their experiment. In the previous work, we performed numerical simulations of micro-/nanoscale gas flow between two sliding surfaces. In the previous work, we successfully reproduced lift force large enough to suspend the slider used in the experiment and found that this effect became notable only for micro-/nanoscale gas flow [IFS-Tsinghua University Joint Workshop 2009, Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Flow Dynamics, 584 (2009)]. In the present paper, we investigate the effect of configuration of micro-/nanoscale structure on sliding surface on molecular gas-film lubrication. Since micro-/nanoscale gas flows between two sliding surfaces cannot be treated as a continuum, we use the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method.
