Ultrahigh vacuum system for advanced tribology studies: Design principles and applications

The main difficulty in designing of an ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) tribometer combined with tribophysical and tribochemical characterization techniques is to find the critical compromise between the scientific requirements and technical or technological limitations from different subsystems and components. The principal conflicts, their possible solutions and the recommended tribometer configurations are analyzed. The developed methodological principles were applied for designing and construction of two UHV experimental tribological systems: TriDes-2 and Ca3UHV. The advances in the design and development of the vacuum system as well as the UHV force sensor and sample holder are presented and discussed.