AFRESH

AFRESH
Friction is a critical component of everyday life. Numerous applications require some friction to function effectively, such as car brakes and tires, while for other applications minimal friction is necessary to prevent the untimely wear of parts and the inefficient dissipation of energy, which is the case for the movement of pistons in car engines. Extensive study has established that optimization of friction performance across systems first requires a thorough atomic-scale understanding, as all sliding surfaces ultimately interact via asperity tips with small surface areas. However, despite recent progress there is still much about atomic-scale friction, and the laws that govern it, that remain unknown. This is due to the complexity of the problem, which depends on surface geometries, surface forces, and material properties (such as shear strength and hardness), and the fact that the study of atomic-scale friction is carried out by a varied and highly multi-disciplinary community. In particular, it consists of researchers from fundamental scientific disciplines, such as chemistry, physics and mathematics, and from applied engineering disciplines, such as materials science and engineering, aerospace engineering, and mechanical engineering. The fact that the atomic-scale friction community consists of researchers with such varied backgrounds has both helped advance the field and sometimes hindered collaboration.

Atomic-scale Friction Research and Education Synergy Hub (AFRESH) is an engineering virtual organization composed of the PIs, their graduate students, and an initial membership of experimental and computational atomic-scale friction researchers with complementary expertise. The intellectual merit of this EVO is that it provides a vehicle for the atomic-scale friction community to come together to (i) share data, (ii) develop, disseminate and encourage the adoption of standards for the performance and analysis of both experiments and simulation, (iii) enhance and share computational and theoretical tools, and (iv) develop powerful teaching tools and related materials. The coordinated effort of this collaborative developed a cyberinfrastructure that allows the global community to coordinate and integrate resources in a manner that is exponentially more efficient than individual isolated efforts. The rapid development of this collaborative is supported, by the EVO projects. The broader impacts of this Atomic-scale Friction Research and Education Collaborative include the fact that it leads to a qualitative increase in understanding, controlling, and exploiting friction at the atomic scale. In addition, it trained graduate students in a multi-disciplinary environment. AFRESH also support forums for professional networking, build a diverse atomic-scale friction community, and facilitate outreach to other scientific communities and cyberinfrastructures.

AFRESH requirements and priorities were gathered from the scientific community during a workshop that took place on November 2007, and its initial deployment can be accessed at http://nsfafresh.org. This cyberinfrastructure is based on wiki technology with extensions that allow users to add a diverse set of information from commented bibliography to applet based scientific tools.

Extensions developed or extended:
 * Extension:AddCategoryParserFunction