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Industrial companies sponsor basic research into contact-lens tribology.
IN SEPTEMBER DR. PHILIPPA CANN OF IMPERIAL COLLEGE IN LONDON, who also serves as an editorial board member of STLE's affiliated journal Tribology Letters, organized the first International Conference on Biotribology (ICoBT), which attracted luminaries from some 38 countries. In addition to the predictably large number of contributions on artificial and natural joints, a significant number of papers were presented concerning the growing areas of skin tribology and contact lenses.
Interestingly, while many of these studies were industrially sponsored, the results nevertheless were communicated to the scientific public.
Several of the contributors to ICoBT have recently published their presented work in Tribology Letters. Notable among these is a comprehensive review' on skin friction by Siegfried Derler of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in St. Gallen, Switzerland and Lutz Gerhard of the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Skin friction is of great practical importance for applications ranging from the design of sports clothing and swimming-pool walking surfaces to the avoidance of bedsores in long-term hospital patients. From the review, it is clear that skin friction displays enormous variation, even when taking into account the fact that skin is a highly nonlinear viscoelastic material. Much of the variation can be attributed to the degree of skin hydration, but overall it can be stated that the...