About State Key Laboratory of Tribology

State Key Laboratory of Tribology

The State Key Laboratory of Tribology, known by the abbreviation SKLT, is a national research laboratory at Tsinghua University in Beijing devoted to tribology — the science of friction, wear and lubrication — and to the neighbouring fields of surface and interface science, bio-tribology and micro- and nano-scale manufacturing. Established in 1986 and accredited by the state and opened in November 1988, it was one of the earliest state key laboratories at Tsinghua University and, in the laboratory's own account, an early state key laboratory in the field of mechanical engineering in China. Its founding director was Wen Shizhu, the academician widely regarded as a pioneer of tribology research in China and the recipient of the 2015 Tribology Gold Medal, the field's highest international honour. On 24 May 2022, following a national reorganisation of state key laboratories, the laboratory was approved for redevelopment as the State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment, the name under which it now operates; this profile records it under its long-attested original name, as its own institutional pages continue to do when describing its history.

Tribology rarely appears in headlines, yet it governs the life and efficiency of almost every machine. Wherever surfaces move against each other — in bearings, gears, seals, engines, artificial joints and hard-disk and chip-manufacturing equipment — friction consumes energy, wear destroys precision and lubrication decides whether the contact survives. A national laboratory that studies those contacts from the macroscopic scale down to films a few molecules thick therefore serves industries as different as rail transport, energy generation, aerospace and medicine, and SKLT was built to do exactly that.

Foundation in 1986 and opening in November 1988

The laboratory's own history page records that its construction was authorised by the former State Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China and the Ministry of Education, that it was founded in 1986, and that it was officially certificated in November 1988. The director's address on the laboratory's website gives the same chronology in slightly different words: established in 1986, accredited by the state and open to the public in November 1988. Wen Shizhu was appointed founding director, and academician Lei Tianjue was appointed chair of the laboratory's first Academic Committee, the body that, under the state key laboratory model, supervises the laboratory while the director is responsible for its whole affairs.

The timing placed SKLT in the first wave of China's state key laboratory programme, and its creation was the institutional culmination of advocacy that Wen had pursued for years. According to the citation for his Tribology Gold Medal, Wen had presided over the establishment of the State Key Laboratory of Tribology at Tsinghua in 1985, in the preparatory sense, after returning from tribology research at Imperial College London in the early 1980s and actively promoting the creation and development of the discipline in China; a biographical account likewise records that he was responsible for the preparation of the laboratory in 1985 and was appointed its director in 1988 after its completion. The laboratory thus embodies a deliberate national decision that friction, wear and lubrication merited a dedicated, long-term, openly accessible research centre.

Wen Shizhu and the founding generation

Wen Shizhu (2 November 1932 – 3 November 2023) graduated from Tsinghua University in 1955 with a first-class honours degree and the Outstanding Graduate Gold Medal, remained at the university, and in 1979 undertook tribology research at Imperial College, London, returning to Tsinghua in 1981. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999. The Gold Medal citation summarises a career spent building Chinese tribology: he had contributed the conceptual framework for research on friction, wear and lubrication to China's twelve-year National Scientific Development Plan as early as 1956, helped draft national guidelines for mechanical engineering research and education, including tribology, in 1982 and 1983, supervised China's first PhD candidate and first postdoctoral researcher in the tribology discipline, in 1981 and 1986 respectively, and edited Principles of Tribology, first published in 1990 and repeatedly reprinted, including in an English version.

His research, and through him the laboratory's early research identity, covered lubrication theory and the mechanism and control of friction and wear, with creative and systematic results in elastohydrodynamic lubrication, rheological lubrication, nano-film lubrication and lubrication state transformation, as well as wear failure mechanisms. Over some fifty years he published more than 600 papers and eight books and received more than 24 major scientific and technological awards, including a National Natural Science Award and a National Scientific and Technological Progress Award; he received the Highest Achievement Award of the Chinese Tribology Institute in 2009, the Chinese Society of Mechanical Engineering's Technology Achievement Award in 2012, the He Liang He Li Foundation's Science and Technology Progress Prize in 2002, and finally the Tribology Gold Medal for 2015, awarded in recognition of his outstanding contribution to tribology and in particular his services in promoting tribology in the Chinese educational establishment. The laboratory's director's address names the founding-era colleagues who built the institution with him, including Zhen Linqing, Liu Jiajun, Liu Yingjie, Jin Yuansheng, Cao Lili, Chen Darong and Hu Yuanzhong, and records the long support of academicians including Xie Youbai, Zhong Jue, Xu Binshi, Xue Qunji, Ren Luquan and Professor Zhang Siwei.

Directors and governance

Under the laboratory's governance model, the director carries overall responsibility under the supervision of the Academic Committee. The history page lists the succession plainly: Wen Shizhu, Chen Darong, Luo Jianbin and Meng Yonggang served as director consecutively, and at the time of that page Professor Tian Yu of Tsinghua University was the current director, with Professor Ren Luquan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from Jilin University, chairing the Academic Committee. Luo Jianbin's tenure is associated in the wider literature with the laboratory's prominent work on nanomanufacturing and chemical mechanical polishing for integrated circuit manufacture, one of the applied directions the laboratory itself highlights among its innovative technologies.

In 2011 Wen Shizhu, together with his students and related organisations, launched the Wen Shizhu Award Fund, managed jointly by the Tsinghua University Education Foundation and the laboratory; in 2022 the fund established the Wen Shizhu Maple Leaf Award – International Young Scholar Award, for outstanding young scholars working outside China who have made outstanding contributions in tribology-related fields, with preliminary evaluation and external review by a panel drawn mainly from the laboratory's International Advisory Committee and the editorial board of the journal Friction. The award is a small but telling detail: the laboratory institutionalised its founder's name not as a monument but as a mechanism for drawing overseas tribologists into cooperation with China.

What tribology covers at SKLT

The laboratory describes itself as a leading scientific research platform in tribology, surface and interface sciences, bio-tribology and bio-mechanics, micro and nano manufacturing theory and technology, and micro and nano photoelectronic measurement technology. Its history page gives the fuller research map: the theory and technology of tribology; surface and interface science and property control in machinery; bio-tribology and biomechanics; micro and nano manufacturing; and micro and nano photonic technology, with the working areas covering friction, wear, lubrication, sealing, surfaces and interfaces, micro and nano manufacturing, intelligent systems, biomechanics and micro and nano photonic devices. It also carries out related technology development and consultation services.

Each term on that list answers to real machinery. Lubrication research asks how a fluid or boundary film keeps surfaces apart; sealing research asks how rotating shafts in pumps, turbines and spacecraft can be closed without leaking or excessive friction; surface and interface science asks how topography, chemistry and coatings change contact behaviour; and micro and nano manufacturing asks how the same contact physics, at very small scales, both limits and enables the fabrication of chips and precision devices. The director's address singles out the laboratory's profound achievements in elastohydrodynamic lubrication, surface topography effects on tribology, thin-film lubrication, fluid rheology, and the control of friction and wear in micro and nano devices, and its innovations in technologies for integrated circuit manufacturing processes and equipment, micro and nano manufacturing, interface drag reduction, anti-wear surface engineering and modification, advanced sealing, robotics and high-power solid-state lasers.

Bio-tribology and the human body as a machine

One of the laboratory's distinctive directions is bio-tribology and biomechanics: the study of friction, wear and lubrication in living systems. Natural joints are among the most effective low-friction bearings known, and artificial joints, dental materials, contact lenses and medical devices all succeed or fail at moving interfaces inside the body. By listing bio-tribology and bio-mechanics alongside machinery tribology as one of its leading platforms, and biotribology and biomedical machinery among the priority technical domains in its 2025 international exchange programme, the laboratory treats the body's contacts with the same theoretical seriousness as an engine bearing's — and can transfer measurement methods, surface designs and lubrication concepts in both directions between engineering and medicine.

This breadth is characteristic of the laboratory's self-description across three decades: it has consistently adhered, in its director's words, to the mission of developing fundamental theories and core technologies for national key industry projects, while focusing on the mechanical design and manufacture of advanced intelligent equipment and on energy conservation and pollutant emission reduction. Friction is an energy issue as much as a mechanical one, since every reduction in unnecessary friction in transport and industry is a direct saving of fuel and emissions, and the laboratory frames its agenda accordingly.

Projects, openness and international links

The laboratory undertakes a large portfolio of national and commissioned research, which its history page lists as including the National Key Basic Research Program (the 973 Program), the High-Tech Research and Development Program (the 863 Program), major projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology, major and key programmes of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, international collaboration projects, and programmes entrusted by companies. That mixture — basic programmes, applied national projects and industry commissions — is the standard state key laboratory pattern, and it explains how a laboratory devoted to fundamental contact science also produces sealing, polishing and surface-engineering technologies used by manufacturers.

Openness is built into the institution. The laboratory has set up a Tribology Science Fund, an Overseas Scholar Fund and an Overseas Graduate Student Fund to support domestic and overseas scholars in cooperative research, and its current International Collaboration and Exchange Program, revised in July 2025, formally welcomes scholars from domestic and international backgrounds to an open research platform. Over three decades, its director records, the laboratory established partnerships with many world-renowned laboratories and formed a culture described as promoting academic dedication, fairness, openness and harmony. The laboratory is also closely associated with the international journal Friction, whose editorial community supplies reviewers for its young scholar award — a sign of how a Beijing laboratory became one of the organising centres of the world tribology community.

Reorganisation as Tribology in Advanced Equipment in 2022

China's state key laboratory system underwent a comprehensive reorganisation in the early 2020s, in which laboratories were restructured and approved anew as national key laboratories. For SKLT, the laboratory's own programme document gives the precise sequence: the laboratory has its roots in the State Key Laboratory of Tribology established in 1988; following preparatory reforms initiated in 2018, it received official approval from the Ministry of Science and Technology for its redevelopment on 24 May 2022, under the name State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment. Tsinghua University's 2023 anniversary message confirms the standing of the change, noting that the State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment and the State Key Laboratory of Power System Operation and Control were selected among the first batch under the university's comprehensive reform of its state key laboratories.

The reorganised laboratory states its mission as exploring the fundamental laws and mechanisms governing the service behaviour of moving interfaces in advanced equipment, and promoting the forward design theory of interface performance — that is, designing an interface's friction, wear and sealing behaviour in advance, from theory, rather than correcting it after testing. Its work is organised as fundamental and applied fundamental research focused on two major directions, core interface technology for advanced equipment and forward design theory, and its 2025 exchange programme lists five priority technical domains: tribology theory and technology; mechanical surface and interface science and performance control; bio-tribology and biomedical machinery; micro and nano manufacturing theory and technology; and design and manufacturing technology for key components of transportation and energy equipment.

Standing and significance

The State Key Laboratory of Tribology occupies a particular place in Chinese science: it is at once a working research centre, a training ground that produced the discipline's first Chinese doctorates, and the institutional home created by the man the international community honoured with its 2015 Gold Medal for building tribology in China. Its history page concludes that its research achievements have significantly contributed to the development of science, technology and the national economy, and that the laboratory is a leading centre for research and education in tribology and micro and nano manufacturing in China.

For directory readers, three cautions preserve accuracy. First, the founding dates are layered — preparation under Wen from 1985, foundation in 1986, and state accreditation and opening in November 1988 — and sources choosing different stages are not necessarily contradicting one another. Second, the post-2022 name, State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment, denotes the same continuing institution, not a new laboratory, and the abbreviation SKLT is retained. Third, claims belong to this laboratory at Tsinghua in Beijing: tribology is studied at several Chinese institutions, but the 1986 foundation, Wen Shizhu's founding directorship and the 24 May 2022 redevelopment approval are the specific, verified marks of this one.