Superlubricitive engineering—Future industry nearly getting rid of wear and frictional energy consumption

Abstract Superlubricity has been developing very rapidly in recent years as a new and important area in tribology. Many new phenomena and materials, as well as some new mechanisms in both liquid and solid superlubricity have been obtained. In liquid superlubricity, tens of new kinds of liquids with superlubricity have been found (e.g., water-based liquids, oil-based lubricants, and liquids combined with additives of two-dimensional (2D) materials that exhibit very good superlubricity properties under high pressure). In the field of solid superlubricity, more materials with superlubricity have been observed, including graphene-to-graphene surfaces, highly oriented pyrolytic graphite to graphene surfaces, and heterostructure surfaces where a friction coefficient as low as 0.00004 has been obtained. However, superlubricity is still under laboratory research. What is the future of superlubricity? What is the barrier restricting superlubricity from industrial applications? How do we transfer superlubricity from scientific research to industrial application? These questions and application fields of superlubricity in near future have been analyzed, and the concept of “superlubricitive engineering” has been proposed in the present work.