The 12th Global Conference on Polymer and Composite Materials (PCM 2025)

Abstract: 20% of the world's energy is used to overcome friction losses in moving systems. Of this, 18 to 40% can be saved using new technologies 1 . Plastic-based composite materials can make a significant contribution to this in sliding contacts. The qualification of tribological systems is a complex process. The load spectrum of such systems is essentially defined by the combination of surface pressure and sliding velocity; in addition, parameters such as ambient temperature, surface properties of the system partners or component geometries play an important role. By modifying the plastics with various fillers, the reliable development of tribological pairings leads to a multidimensional investigation window with an almost unmanageable experimental effort. A completely new approach using novel intelligent test technology in combination with artificial intelligence tools can reliably determine the impact of a large number of parameters. The presentation highlights the relationships and mechanisms that have been explored over the past decades, but also the limitations of this approach for the targeted development of high-performance tribocomposites. The talk shows that artificial neural networks can solve this problem. They are superior to the human brain in pattern recognition and thus in predicting tribological properties depending on a variety of loads. However, ANNs require a large amount of data as input, which can be achieved in a time and cost-efficient manner with the intelligent testing technology presented here.

Keywords: Tribology, High Performance Composites, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Testing

Biography: Professor Alois K. Schlarb currently serves as Senior Research Professor at the RheinlandPfälzische Technische Universität (RPTU), is a member of the State Research Center OPTIMAS at RPTU, and a visiting professor at Qingdao University of Science and Technology (QUST), PR China.
Alois K. Schlarb studied mechanical engineering at the University of Kaiserslautern, specializing in production engineering and company organization. After his graduation in 1984 he relocated to the University of Kassel, working as a scientific assistant to Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. e.h. Ehrenstein. He was awarded a doctorate in 1989 for his thesis on polymer processing. From 1988 until 1989 he was also head engineer at the university’s Institut fuer Werkstofftechnik (Institute of Materials Technology). In the following 13 years Professor Schlarb held different positions in the industry, e.g. the polymer laboratory of BASF SE as material scientist and project manager researching composites, last as Vice President and head of marketing, research and development with B. Braun Medical AG, Switzerland. In November 2002 Alois Schlarb was appointed to a full professorship for "Composite Materials" at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (now RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau) and held this position until March 31, 2022. From 2002 to 2008 he served in parallel as Chief Executive Officer of the Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe GmbH (Institute of Composite Materials). Since 2018 Alois Schlarb also holds a visiting professorship at Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, PR China.
Professor Schlarb served as Spokesman of the Scientific Alliance of Polymer Technology (WAK) from 2009 - 2015 and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Materials and Processing Engineering SAMPE Deutschland e.V. from 2003 - 2015. He is on the editorial board or scientific advisory board of several journals and has more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He is also the editor/author/co-author of several books and book chapters. The focus of his research activities is on process-structure-property-relations and tribology of polymer-based hybrid materials.