Tribomechadynamics is a nascent field of mechanical engineering that has emerged from the integration of tribology, contact mechanics, and structural and nonlinear dynamics. The principle challenge identified within the tribomechadynamics community is how to predict the nonlinear response of a structure with frictional interfaces. This challenge is exacerbated by frictional interfaces exhibiting wear and evolving, sometimes quite dramatically, over time, which can have profound effects on the nonlinear dynamic response of a structure (in particular, the hysteretic behavior and the amplitude-dependent natural frequencies and damping ratios of the structure). By necessity, tribomechadynamic studies span length scales from nanometers to decameters and time scales from microseconds to years. Consequently, this presents a number of formidable challenges for both experimentation and computational efforts, as detailed throughout this special issue.
The origins of tribomechadynamics can be traced back to the Structural Dynamics 2000 workshop in 1999 [1] hosted by Los Alamos...
