UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

In today’s world, we’ve invented many new technologies that have allowed us to map out the earth’s surface but just as we can map out surfaces in a large scale, we can also map out surfaces in a very small scale such as in nanometers. Thus, giving us opportunities to study & discover various materials such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) crystalline flakes. MoS₂ being a material that has a similar yet different structure to graphene, low friction when compared to SiO₂ (a low friction material as is), and provides many potential applications that can be implemented into aerospace as a solid lubricant. But like any fellow researcher studying a material, each has their own methods/techniques that they use to obtain results. In our proposal, we will cover the research that has taken place to provide a consensus of MoS₂’s potential application as a solid lubricant in aerospace to its low frictional properties in the nanometer scale. And the technologies we’ll be looking into to access for our methods/techniques for researching will be Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), X-Ray Photoelectric Spectroscopy (XPS), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), and Tribometers at the University of California, Merced (UC Merced).