Increasing bearing area to decrease friction
Friction in atomically precise diamondoid slide bearings ...
- is dominated by dynamic friction
which scales quadratically with speed:
1/2x speed => 1/4x friction | 1/10x speed => 1/100x friction - is proportional to the bearing area (2x area => 2x friction)
For details see: Friction
Side-note:
Low speed friction in macroscale bearings is quite different as it is
speed independent, area independent, load dependent.
The trick
This allows for a neat trick:
- Halving speed and
- doubling machinery
(this keeps the total throughput constant) leads to
- quartering friction losses due to reduced bearing speed
- doubling friction losses due to increased bearing area
Overall a halving of friction.
Q: But isn't doubling the amount of machinery a problem?
A: No!
There is exceptionally little machinery needed to
get practical levels of throughput (aka product production rate).
This is due to the scaling law of higher throughput of smaller machinery.
Limits to the trick
See math on main page: Limits to lower friction despite higher bearing area
- assembly motions can be slowed down by adding more sub layers.
- transport motions can not be slowed by adding more sub layers.
At some point assembly motions reach become similarly slow as the assembly motions.
At this point adding further sub-layers there is no further reduction of frictive losses but rather frictive losses ride again. (eventually linearly).
Applications cases
- This can be applied in the design of gem-gum on-chip factories to
optimize thickness of assembly layers of gem-gum factories
or just to get estimates for likely system geometries - This is the theoretical basis for infinitesimal bearings.
