Stroboscopic illusion in animations of diamondoid molecular machine elements

Thermal motions are in the km/second speed range.
Machine motions are in the mm/s to m/s speed range.

Beware of the stroboscopic illusion

well animated bearing The fast thermal vibrations are more realistically blurred out. The remaining localized periodic average deformations (visible here if one looks closely) are highly reversible. (See page abbout "superlubrication".)	badly animated bearing The present stroboscopic effect can be misleading in that friction is likely to be grossly overestimated. It deceivingly looks like as if the operating speed would be close to the speed of the thermal vibration. If that where the case it indeed would cause massive friction (strong coupling of motions with similar frequency).

Simulated DMEs often show a misleading stroboscopic effect which can make one believe that the operation frequencies lie near the thermal frequencies, giving the false impression of enormously high friction but actually the contrary is true.
See: "Friction in gem-gum technology" and "Superlubrication".

(wiki-TODO: pack the above in a template so I can put it on this page, the crytolecule main page, and the crystolecule example page)

Related

• Superlubricity
• Snapback
• Gemstone-like molecular element
• Example crystolecules

External links

• Wikipedia: Wagon-wheel effect