Systematic study of the effect of disorder on nanotribology of self-assembled monolayers

The adhesion and friction between ordered and disordered self-assembled monolayers was studied using molecular dynamics. Investigations show that the disorder was introduced by randomly removing chains from a well ordered crystalline substrate. It was found that the adhesion force between the monolayers at a given separation increased monotonically with chain length at full coverage. The results show that the friction becomes insensitive to chain length, defect density and substrate with random defects.