Use of Liquid Lubricant with Glass Microspheres in Suspension to Permanently Improve the Tribological Behavior of PPS

In the numerous applications of technical polymers, it is a wide practice to compound them with solid lubricants in early steps of fabrication to improve the tribological behavior, considerably reducing friction and wear. Nonetheless, especially in injection molding, the inclusion of these lubricants often poses difficulties as they can significantly alter the viscosity and thermal behavior of the resin inside the screw. This practice is also quite inefficient due to the treatment of the whole bulk of the parts, where only the contact surfaces are affected by these inclusions. So, the aim of this work is to use lubricants with these solid particles in suspension, in order to have them permanently embedded in the working surfaces as they are put into service and then studying the impact that these inclusions have in the tribological behavior of the base polymer.