Professor Emeritus Izhak Etsion

Professor Emeritus Izhak Etsion has had a remarkable academic career spanning over forty years at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. His tribology research group, at its peak, consisted of 2 faculty members and 4 senior scientists. Over 60 postdoctoral, PhD, and MSc students graduated from this group, and outstanding research was conducted on many aspects of tribology, including hydrodynamic lubrication, surface texturing, contact mechanics, bio-tribology, and nano-tribology. The group had international collaborations with UC Berkeley and UC San Diego in the US, Max Planck Institute in Germany, and Tsinghua University in China, to name a few. It also addressed all the tribology needs of Israel.

Prof. Emeritus Etsion is the author and co-author of more than 290 scientific archival publications (h-index 73, with over 28,600 citations). He is also the inventor and co-inventor of 16 patents, some of which led to the creation of several Israeli start-up companies.

He made pioneering contributions in mechanical seal dynamics and became a leader in this field. He is also a world expert in laser surface texturing (LST), which has emerged as a unique surface engineering technology for energy conservation by reducing friction and wear. For his original contributions in seal dynamics and LST, Professor Etsion has been awarded multiple Technion and international awards.

Professor Etsion made groundbreaking contributions in modeling contact, adhesion, and static friction of rough surfaces and was one of the originators of the 1987 classical Chang–Etsion–Bogy (“CEB”) elastic-plastic asperity contact model, which opened the way for analyzing elastic-plastic contact mechanics of rough surfaces. He also contributed significantly to the development of universal dimensionless models for basic tribological phenomena, and his Technion research group became a leading team in elastic-plastic contact mechanics.

Professor Etsion is a Life Fellow of ASME and STLE and the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the STLE International Award (2005), the highest STLE honor; the ASME Mayo D. Hersey Award (2016); and the IMechE James Watt International Gold Medal (2021).

Professor Etsion also made pioneering contributions to bio-tribology by experimentally studying, for the first time, friction and wear of human cartilage-on-cartilage, which in 2008 led to the establishment of the start-up company “Moebius Medical,” developing novel pain relief treatments for osteoarthritis, a condition affecting over 100 million people worldwide.

Professor Etsion further developed universal modeling of coatings at the asperity level. Some notable findings include the identification of optimum coating thickness for maximum resistance to plastic yield and the weakening effect of very thin hard coatings. The most recent studies by Professor Etsion’s research group involve modeling adhesive wear, resulting in several important original publications. Theoretical modeling of wear remains one of the most challenging tasks in contemporary tribology.

Considering his outstanding achievements, Professor Etsion has received the Research.com Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Leader Award every year since 2021. He was ranked among the top 1% of the world’s leading scientists in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and listed as #1 in Israel.