Friction and anti-wear property of aqueous symmetrical tri-block normal PEOm-PPOn-PEOm and reverse PPOn-PEOm-PPOn copolymer solutions have been studied. The study focuses on the effect of the solution bulk temperatures and the copolymer block structures. It was found that the concentration and the length of the copolymer blocks affect the solution cloud points, friction and anti-wear property. When solution was supplied at bulk temperature above their cloud point, aqueous copolymer solutions were not able to develop effective adsorbed film resulting in high friction and severe wear. When the bulk temperatures were below the cloud point, the anti-wear property improved significantly and the dynamic friction is lower than that when the temperatures were above the cloud point. This demonstrates the importance of the supply temperature of this type of lubricant in metal forming. However by adding ethyl phosphate ester to the copolymer solutions further improved friction reducing property of the solutions was observed and the friction and anti-wear property of the lubricant become insensitive to bulk temperature. In the effort to understand the lubrication mechanism of the aqueous solutions, wear tracks were studied using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and atomic force microscope (AFM), and the surface wetting ability via contact angle measurements.
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