N.J. Subsequently, he headed up a research and development team at Battelle Memorial Institute. He then became general manager of Battelle Geneva Operations in the last decade of his career. In his present position, he develops coating and cladding techniques to prolong the life of critical machine parts exposed to wear of all kinds. D.C. Sun Sun has been a tribologist for 28 years. He has often been able to solve problems through innovative studies and methods.
Several examples follow.
In analyzing the performance of externally pressurized porous bearings, he produced a rigorous mathematical proof that these bearings are stable if incompressible lubricant is used. In the study of surface roughness effect in fluid film lubrication, he was the first to elucidate the roughness spacing effect. In the study of sheet metal-forming lubrication, he produced a dimensionless parameter that combined the metal and lubricant properties, the forming speed, and the geometry and roughness of the work piece. Forming limit can be raised by using this parameter as the criterion. In the study of ring-bore contact, he was able to use a complementary formulation to compute the contact pattern and contact stress between arbitrarily shaped piston ring and cylinder bore.