LIFE LIQUID
Oct 07, 2019
3 minutes
By KEVIN CAMERON
Photography by
JEFF ALLEN
In a celebrated case, a vertical shaft hydroelectric turbine ran continuously for 40 years without shutdown. When it was finally replaced, its thrust-bearing surfaces still bore the tool marks of their manufacture. How was that possible? It was because the bearing surfaces—one rotating, the other stationary—had never touched. They had been completely separated by a thin and continuously replaced film of oil.
This is the ideal to which all surface friction in
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