Pitenis, AA, Dowson, D orcid.org/0000-0001-5043-5684 and Gregory Sawyer, W (2014) Leonardo da Vinci’s Friction Experiments: An Old Story Acknowledged and Repeated. Tribology Letters, 56 (3). pp. 509-515. ISSN 1023-8883
Abstract
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is universally regarded as a brilliant polymath, designer, astronomer, artist, philosopher, and a visionary engineer of the Renaissance era. Interestingly, due to the delayed discovery of several caches of his notebook pages (as late as the 1960s), his immense contribution to the field of tribology has only recently surfaced. From these salvaged documents, da Vinci’s three notable observations that preceded the development of the laws of friction were uncovered: (1) Friction is independent of apparent contact area, (2) the resistance of friction is directly proportional to applied load, and (3) friction has a consistent value of µ = 0.25. In this work, we have attempted to construct a nearly faithful recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s apparatus for measuring friction based on his notebook illustrations and investigate the conditions under which Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments produced his findings. Our experiments, performed roughly 500 years later, reproduced Leonardo da Vinci’s findings of friction coefficients with wood of µ = 0.25, but only under conditions of roughly cut and brusquely squared samples of dry wood that were handled and sullied by hand in a fashion typical of wood working but inconsistent with the modern laboratory practice. Thus, our interpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s findings is that these first tribological studies were actually performed on roughly cut and unpolished samples that had been handled extensively prior to and during testing; Such a procedure of sample preparation is entirely reasonable for the time period and suggests an active, dusty, and dynamic laboratory environment.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2014, Wiley. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Tribology Letters. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11249-014-0428-7 |
Keywords: | Friction; Friction coefficient; Static friction; Friction laws; Leonardo da Vinci |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mechanical Engineering (Leeds) > Institute of Engineering Thermofluids, Surfaces & Interfaces (iETSI) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 19 May 2017 14:10 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2018 14:00 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11249-014-0428-7 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:112962 |