Ali Erdemir
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Ali Erdemir, born in Kadirli, Adana, Turkey, is a Turkish materials scientist specializing in surface engineering and tribology.
He graduated from the Metallurgy Department of the Istanbul Technical University in 1977. After working for two years at the İskenderun Iron and Steel Company in Turkey as an engineer, he went to the USA for doctoral studies. Erdemir received a master's degree in materials engineering and a doctorate in materials science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1986, respectively. After completing his military service in Turkey, Erdemir began in 1987 to work as an assistant metallurgist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, which is operated by the University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy. Since 1990, he is conducting his research as a materials scientist.
Erdemir has broken one of the technological records of the century by conducting friction tests on a new ultra-hard, low-friction coating. The material is many times slicker than Teflon and hard enough to show promise for use in automobile engine parts. It is reported that the invention of Erdemir, who has been on the covers of many scientific magazines published in the USA, has broken the friction coefficient record by 20-fold. He developed a carbon coating that showed the lowest coefficient of friction, less than 0.001, when tested in a dry nitrogen atmosphere. This makes the carbon coating 40 times slicker than Teflon, which has a coefficient of about 0.04.
Erdemir made Argonne Laboratory the number one research center for tribology and has received many international prizes, including three R&D awards, considered the Oscar of technology, in 1991, 1998 and 2003 for a boric acid lubricant and a near frictionless carbon coating, respectively. He has patent rights for six of his inventions.
Erdemir is member of several professional societies and published more than 100 scientific papers in the fields of friction, wear, lubrication of materials and coatings. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Anatolia, Eskişehir, Turkey in 1998.
