1. Understanding the tribo-electro-corrosion mechanisms of ionic liquids to enhance the degradation resistance of electric vehicle components

Overview:
Traditional lubricants are developed through fossil-based or synthetic routes, which often pose detrimental impacts by exposing entrapped carbons to the environment. The current life cycle of traditional lubricants barely suits the green agenda of the EV industry, which is highly valued for its commitment to sustainability. Bio-lubricants, which have been developed in known literature, lack efficiency in terms of friction and wear reduction at high contact pressure compared to traditional lubricants. The higher torque generated by EV motors requires high load-bearing capacity, and therefore, lubricants are not efficient enough to serve the need. Moreover, the nonconductive nature of traditional bio-lubricants doesn’t help protect the surface from accelerated degradation from tribe-electro-corrosion. To understand the tribo-electro-corrosion synergism, the tasks under my research include:

Objectives:

1. Understanding the physicochemical and tribological behavior of bio-based PRTILs at the steel-PRTIL interface.

2. Elucidating the role of physicochemical and structural properties of bio-based PRTILs on their electrochemical interaction with steel.

3. Unraveling the wear-corrosion synergism of PRTILs at engineering steel surfaces.

4. Understanding the contact electrification-induced wear-electro-corrosion synergism of steel surfaces.

5. Enhancing the tribo-electro-corrosion performance of PRTILs-hybrid nanolubricants to reduce the electric power loss of PRTILs under electrified conditions.

• Bacground Research

Plastic pollution is one of the major challenges of this century.  The problem of waste accumulation in the landfill and in the ocean litter is increasing even after the inception of bioplastics. To tackle this problem, thermo-chemical conversion processes, such as pyrolysis  has been introduced earlier with a view to converting plastics into usable chemicals and fuels.  Besides, biomass to fuel conversion is another well addressed process. However, the pyrolytic oil obtained from biomass, usually suffers from low calorific value and high oxygenated content. On the other hand, pyrolytic oils from plastics can produce high calorific value and low oxygenated contents. So, their mixture at different ratio is an interesting field of research. The obtained chemicals, thus should possess higher value to contribute in circular plastic economy. With proper catalyst, at optimum condition, plastic and pine biomass can be converted to gasoline range hydrocarbon fuel. This is also important from the perspective of protecting existing fossil fuel reserve for future. Current reserve to production ratio (R/P) shows that the world will be out of oil, gas and coal within next 100 years. Therefore, to restrict plastic pollution and to establish an alternative source of energy, plastics (including bioplastics) can be utilized for fuel production along with pine biomass through thermo-chemical conversion processes.

• Characterization, Experimentation and Observations

1. Characterization of plastic samples were done using FT-IR, SEM, EDS & CHNS analyzer

2. Reactor was designed, and the thermal simulation was done under transient condition using Ansys

3. Reactor was fabricated with SS and have two columns  to make separate feedstock bed and catalytic bed

4. ZSM-5 was purchased from ACS materials and their characterization was done using SEM, EDS analyzers

5. Thermo-chemical conversion of plastics with  catalyst using two column staged reactor was performed. There was a production of significant (20-30%) pyrolysis oil apart from gaseous hydrocarbons (C1-C5)

6. Analysis of pyrolysis oil using FTIR and GC-MS