Fundamental aspects and recent progress on wear/scratch damage in polymer nanocomposites

It is realized that the addition of a small percentage of rigid nanoparticles to polymers significantly improves many of their mechanical properties, especially stiffness and strength. Such improvements are often attributed to the availability of large numbers of nanoparticles with huge interfacial areas compared to their macro- and micro-scale counterparts. In particular, from the tribological viewpoint, the small size of nanoparticles with...