(FLW) as an acronym is easy to remember, which certainly helped me when I first started looking after the IET’s Tribology Network last year and was getting to grips with what the subject encompassed.   A year has passed and I’ve come to appreciate that there is so much more to Tribology and how it has many applications across a wide range of sectors.

 We recently held our two day conference in Birmingham at IET Austin Court where we welcomed a good mix of industry, academia and student delegates to the event.    This year we were pleased to have so many poster submissions, as we managed to double the numbers from the 2018 event and had 19 presenters over the two days.  


Day One poster competition was won by Bjoern Kunzelmann from Imperial College London with his poster on ‘Experimental and Numerical Studies into the Mechanisms of Surface Crack Propagation under Rolling Contact’.


Day Two poster winner was Josh Armitage from Leeds University with a poster on ‘Electrical Material Characterisation for Applications in Triboelectric Nanogenerators’.


The lucky winners each received a £100 gift certificate courtesy of Taylor & Francis, together with an opportunity to contribute to their Tribology journal and a cash prize of £150 per winning poster from the TPN committee.


We also had a good number of sponsoring exhibitors this year courtesy of Anton Parr, Bruker, CNTech, CWSE and Rtec which helped to generate some interesting discussions during the networking session.  The TPN would like to thank all of these companies for supporting the 2019 event.


During the Quo Vadimus sessions we had some interesting feedback on potential topics for future events and will be taking these comments and the other delegate feedback into account when planning our future programme for 2020 and beyond.


Comment from Rich Baker, TPN Chairman:

Thank you to all our speakers over the 2 days for presenting cutting-edge relevant research work which stimulated such good debate during the sessions and in the networking breaks.  I would also like to thank the IET organisers and venue staff for another first class experience for all the delegates and for arranging the sunshine while we were staying in Birmingham!