Diminishing fuel consumption and exhaust fumes emission as well as increasing performance requires new technological solutions to control friction and wear. To achieve this goal, Laser Surface Texturing (LST) appears as a promising way in many tribological applications to increase the lifetime of contacts or to make their working conditions more severe. In the case of hydrodynamic and mixed lubrication, it has been demonstrated that micro-texturing one of the contacting surfaces with optimized micro-dimples could reduce friction and wear [1, 2]. Over the last two decades, the fundamental understanding of the effects generated by such sub-contact scale features on the behaviour of Elasto-Hydrodynamically Lubricated (EHL) contacts have become a research subject of major importance, with the unprecedented improvements both in computational techniques and in film thickness measurement methods. In this work, the lubrication mechanisms induced by LASER made circular micro-cavities passing through an EHL point contact are analysed both experimentally and numerically in stationary and transient regimes.
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