Room temperature ionic liquids (ILs) have become increasingly popular in academia and industry since the end of last century. Except for their extensive applications in diverse fields, it is well established that ILs are potential versatile lubricants with excellent friction reduction and extreme pressure properties. However, regarding the application of ILs under working conditions, the usage of traditional ILs lubricants usually suffers from the corrosivity and low efficiency at elevated temperature.

Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Solid Lubrication of the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics have synthesized vinyl functionalized imidazolium ILs nd used them as lubricants at high temperature.

It is found that although it exhibits similar performance as ILHEImBF4 with up to 1500N extreme pressure, this new lubricant is much less corrosive at high temperature/150℃. This should be the first time to report that IL lubricant could work at high temperature with low corrosivity and high loading capacity. The good performance is supposed to be due to the interaction of vinyl group on the imidazolium ring with iron surface, which is helpful to compose ordered absorption film and the tribochemical reaction film.

The work has received support from the National Program on Key Basic Research Project of China (973) Program, National Natural Science Foundation of China .

The findings have been published in Tribology International (Tribology International 44 (2011) 1111–1117).

Tribology InternationalPaper

ILs synthesized and used in this work.