R&D 100 Entry 2022: SHIFT Highly Parallelized and Automated Tribometers

In tribology, or friction and wear testing, tests are typically slow and can’t be expedited without changing the result. This makes testing expensive and time consuming, which means that, for a given research effort, it is difficult to obtain statistical significance in results without spending a lot of time. The SHIFT Highly Parallelized and Automated Tribometers system solves this problem in two ways: by allowing a large number of tests to be run in parallel or by automating the test setup procedure, which removes the requirement for an operator to be present between tests. Automation of some test setup tasks means that institutions can take advantage of off-hour testing, which is normally lost productivity. SAND2022 6454V