Loss of energy and efficiency due to friction costs the economy billions of dollars annually. Controlling friction in large-scale systems has traditionally been done with lubricants. However, lubricant behavior changes drastically and for the worse when the size of the lubricant film is of the order a few nanometers (a few billionths of a meter). With the rapid development of nanotechnology, a new approach to controlling friction was urgently needed. Researchers from the Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research (CESAR) at ORNL have developed FRICON, an extremely efficient, fast and robust control scheme. FRICON's efficiency is not limited to nanodevices and microelectromechanical systems; the method can be implemented on systems of any size. Because friction is omnipresent in scientific, engineering, and technological applications, the scheme has broad relevance and applicability.
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