Dr. Liran Ma, Associate Professor, China Young Chang Jiang Scholar, State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University, China

Biography: She received her Ph.D in 2010 in department of precision instrument and mechanology from Tsinghua University (China). Following a postdoctoral period at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, she is now working as an Associate Professor in State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University. She was elected as the Young Chang Jiang Scholar in 2015. Her current research interests are tribology and surface & interface science. She has published over 40 SCI papers. Her work has been cited more than 300 times and reported by international academic website. She is the principle investigator of 6 Research Projects.

Title: Molecular behaviors in thin lubrication film

Abstract: Molecules confined in a nano gap always present special properties that are different from those at the macro scale. As a branch of nanotribology, thin film lubrication (TFL) exhibits unique phenomena and obeys specific lubrication rules that cannot be predicted by classical lubrication theory. The set-up of TFL theory and related models outlined a whole map for lubrication regimes while offering insight into the molecular pattern in a confined liquid film. However, to date, experiments are unlikely to observe and further confirm the TFL model owing to the great difficulties in extracting interfacial molecular information from bulk liquid nano-films in an actual fluidic/lubrication process. Here, we successfully distinguished the molecular information from the adsorbed layer and fluidic layer using a nano-sandwich structured film observed during the lubrication.