On October 15th, AXEL arranged a seminar presenting joint research projects with the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). There were more than 30 attendants, of which approximately 1/3 were virtually present from across Europe and USA.

We have collaborated since 2012 with Professor Sergei Glavatskih and his team at the Department of System and Component Design at KTH in Stockholm. The collaboration has evolved over the years and we are currently running many different joint projects.  During the seminar most of the current projects were presented by the PhD students, master students and postdoctoral researchers working on the projects.

• Gabriel Calderon, PhD student, talked about “Greases for electric drives: The energy-saving potential and the thickener effect." He showed that choosing the correct grease thickener will save energy in high speed bearing applications.
• Bulat Munavirov, PhD student, made a presentation titled “Ionic liquids as neat lubricants and additives in greases." Here Bulat gave an overview of how different ionic liquid performs under various contact conditions.
• Fabian Schwack, Postdoctoral researcher, gave everyone a thorough introduction into pitch bearing lubrication in his presentation: “A study of grease lubricants under wind turbine pitch bearing conditions.”
• Román de la Presilla, PhD student, gave us new insights into “Grease lubricity in an oscillating contact” and how small changes in the grease composition can affect breakaway friction in oscillating contacts.
• Sateesh Nataraj and Dinesh Thirunavukkarasu, both Master students, presented on the effect of different additives in highly loaded contacts simulating gear conditions. Their presentations were titled “Tribological performance of Polypropylene and Li-complex greases with ZDDP, MoDTC and MoS2 additives” and “Tribological performance of Polypropylene and Li-complex greases with ionic liquid additives.”

We thank Johan Leckner for organising the seminar and the KTH team for very interesting presentations and, even more importantly, the research work carried out in these projects.