20 Minutes With Andreas Rosenkranz

By Nicole Gleeson, Editorial Coordinator | TLT 20 Minutes November 2026

This professor at the University of Chile discusses micro-/macro-tribology, MXenes, coatings, hydrodynamic lubrication and more.
Andreas Rosenkranz - The Quick File
 Andreas Rosenkranz is a professor for Materials-Oriented Tribology and New 2D Materials in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Biotechnology and Materials at the University of Chile. His research focuses on the characterization, chemical functionalization and application of new 2D materials. His main field of research relates to tribology, but in the last several years, he has expanded his fields of interest toward water purification, catalysis and biological properties. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed publications in well-known journals including Nature Reviews Materials, Advanced Materials and ACS Nano, among others. He is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and acts as a senior editor for ACS Langmuir.


Andreas Rosenkranz
TLT: What initially drew you to the field of tribology, and how has your focus evolved over the years?
Rosenkranz: When I was a very young student back in Germany, I studied materials science and engineering. I did my bachelor's and master's degrees (at least the equivalent, which was at that time the diploma) at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. And as a young student, I remember very well, I had my first class on functional materials. And I got very interested in this overall topic, applying materials to specific applications to improve their performance.

And in that time, I connected with the host of my subsequent doctoral thesis, Frank Mücklich, and I started to work in his lab. In the lab of Professor Mücklich in that time, there were certain topics about intermetallic phases, there was a topic about electric discharge, and there was a topic about surface engineering using laser surface texturing to improve friction and wear.

As a very young student, I got insights into all these three different topics. What fascinated me most was the topic tribology, interacting surfaces. I understood pretty early that this was a highly complex field.

But this kept me fascinated, I think, until today, because this complexity is exactly what makes it very interesting, but also very challenging on the same hand. In this sense, I started to work on my diploma thesis on the topic, how surface textures produced by laser on stainless steel surfaces can help to change friction and wear under lubricated conditions. So, I was working on the mixed lubricated conditions.

I actually continued this topic in my doctoral thesis. I studied the effect of laser surface texturing on the dry boundary mixed and hydrodynamic lubrication, which also included a research stay at Imperial College in London in the tribology group that further sparked my interest in tribology.

After my doctorate degree, I moved on to a physics department, and I worked on the tribology of hard coatings. Subsequently, I got a Humboldt fellowship to come to the U.S. to the University of California, San Diego. There I worked for the first time on more of the application side.

I worked on very thin carbon films used for magnetic recording, so tribology on the very applied side. And then in 2017-2018, when I got my professorship, I got very interested in surface in nanomaterials in 2D materials.

I started to work on MXenes and composite materials, and this is the entire evolution. So, you can see that I first worked on surface engineering.

Then I worked on hard coatings. Afterward, I worked on more application magnetic disk recording. And I moved back to a very fundamental research on 2D MXenes and exploring how MXenes help to reduce friction and what are the underlying mechanisms.

TLT: Your work often involves surface functionalization—can you explain what that means and how it impacts material performance?
Rosenkranz: Surface functionalization happens when you start to chemically modify surfaces. The surfaces can be stainless steel substrates or silicon surfaces, or they can be the surface of basically any 2D nanomaterial, for instance, graphene, graphene oxide or MXenes. And then the issue is, for instance, you have a certain idea, or you wish to apply this surface or this nanomaterial in a certain application. But the surface properties are not aligning well with the targeted applications and the target properties that you need.

So, in this sense, you start to think how you can change the surface or the surface properties of this nanomaterial to make it more compatible with the respective requirement. There are chemical ways, for instance, you start to play with basic chemistry. For instance, you think, okay, I have a certain chemistry of my surface of my nanomaterial, and I would like to have a certain surface property.

And you think, which kind of molecule is comparable or compatible with the surface that I would like to work with? And which kind of property would I like to use in this surface or nanomaterial? And then you start to try to connect basically the molecule with the surface of the nanomaterial. And then since you change the surface chemistry, you also change the superficial properties. A very good example is, for instance, playing between hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces.

Sometimes you have a surface that is hydrophilic, but for a certain application, you want to have it hydrophobic. For instance, you can use the surface chemistry of this hydrophilic surface. And you can call, for instance, a molecule that is hydrophobic.

And if you do it in the right way, you can basically change the properties of the surface of the nanomaterial from hydrophilic to completely hydrophobic. And this is basically the key and the magic that happens with surface functionalization. In this sense, how does it affect the material performance? As I said, you can basically change from hydrophilic to hydrophobic.

You have the entire range. That means you can completely change and completely invert the performance of a material or surface in a specific application. And this makes it very interesting because with that, you can basically play with surface properties.

You can play with the performance. You can adjust. You can manipulate.

And you do it in an intentional way. This is not something that happens randomly or stochastically. This happens because you design the respective interaction to happen.

And you think which kind of property will do what I need in the surface. So this is the kind of design principle that you can basically use to make surfaces more adaptable and the material performance more predictable.

TLT: How do 2D materials like MXenes change the game when it comes to reducing wear and friction?
Rosenkranz: MXenes are a very interesting material class, first introduced and discovered in 2011 at Drexel University by Yury Gogotsi and Michel Barsoum. This is basically a class that connects early transition metals, carbides, nitrides and carbonitrides.

So this is an entire family. They have very interesting properties that we cannot find in other 2D materials because, first of all, from a structural point of view, they have a layer-like surface structure.

They have good electrical conductivity. They have reasonable thermal conductivity. They have good mechanical properties.

They have adjustable and tunable surface chemistry. And this property combination that is basically inherited by the Max phase is the precursor to produce MXenes, we have never seen in any other 2D material. If we are connected with the tribological performance of friction wear, we are well aware that there is molybdenum disulfide, there is graphene and graphene oxide.

Most of them show a very good friction performance, so a very low coefficient of friction, which depends a little bit on the environmental conditions. Some nanomaterials work on the dry conditions, some nanomaterials work on the humid conditions. But the interesting thing is they show good friction properties, but typically once friction goes up, they start to wear off over time and catastrophic wear is going to happen at a certain point.

MXenes work differently because they have interesting surface chemistry. They have a certain surface reactivity, which basically comes from the surface termination and also from the transition metals that are involved. And the thing that happens if you have a MXene coating or MXene particle under the impact of stress, so mechanical stress and temperature induced by rubbing and friction, then we do a tribochemistry in the end.

So what is happening is we use the mechanical input, the mechanical stress and the temperature that is evolving to induce chemical reactions to form reaction products. We basically transform the MXene particle or the MXene coating into very thin tribolayers, which you have to imagine are the reaction products. And these tribolayers are very resistant, which makes it very different to other 2D materials because we form reaction layers that stick where they're supposed to stick and that typically are very difficult to remove.

They don't show very low friction in most of the cases, but they show a very interesting wear resistance and a very interesting durability. So this is the reason why MXene coatings can be very interesting for any kind of applied condition, using the mechanical components where maybe the friction properties are not that important, but we would like to extend the useful wear lifetime.

And this is why I believe that MXenes will be the key changer and the game player in the next five to 10 years, if we look more into the applied properties of MXene coatings and real working conditions in mechanical components.

TLT: You've worked across continents—from Germany to Chile. How has this international experience shaped your research perspective?
Rosenkranz: I have studied material science and engineering in Germany. I have completed my doctorate degree in Germany. During my doctoral studies, I had a longer research day at the Imperial College in London, UK.

Afterward, I moved to Latin America, to Chile. Then I bounced back to the U.S. before ending up again in Chile. As you can imagine, it was a very, very rich experience in different senses, because from a professional point of view, I got used to working in different environments and different educational systems that, of course, connect with different languages.

The culture and language are different. So in this sense, it was always a challenge to adapt to a new educational system that has borne certainly in my mind. There are good things in the German, in the English or even in the Latin or the American system in terms of research, development and education.

Of course, if you come to a very different country compared to your home country, there is a cultural shock that you need to overcome. There is a new language that you need to learn. There are certain barriers that really force you to come out of your comfort zone.

This coming out of my comfort zone, struggling a little bit and sometimes having a hard time, I think, has been very beneficial for my personal development in this sense, because I believe it made me the person and also the researcher I am right now. So it certainly affected my professional trajectory, but also my personal character in this sense.

And if a young researcher has the opportunity to do that, I highly recommend to come out of your comfort zone to struggle a little bit, because it's very, very beneficial for professional and personal development.

TLT: What role do you see tribology playing in advancing sustainable technologies in the near future?
Rosenkranz: Tribology, friction, where it connects directly to energy efficiency, durability, maintaining costs, manufacturing costs and production costs. I believe we all would like to have a more sustainable future.

So in this sense, really working on advanced systems for lubrication that are more sustainable, that can be solid lubrication, that can be lubricants more on renewable sources like cellulose, like lignin, for instance. I think this is the way to go to really reduce CO2 emissions to make our environment less contaminated, to hopefully create mechanical components that are more wear resistant and that have a longer service lifetime under real conditions.

Tribology is one of the key players in this area. And I think it's very important to keep pushing the boundaries to make our future more sustainable and greener in this sense.

TLT: How can we transfer knowledge gained in the discipline of tribology to other fields?
Rosenkranz: Tribology is the science of moving surfaces under certain contact pressure, under certain relative motion.

I believe if we think about our daily life, about applications that we use, we find tribology in all the different areas. If you think about your watch that you have on your wrist, if you think about the car that you drive, if you think about the plane that you take to travel from A to B, if you think about energy generation, everywhere we have moving parts, everywhere there's friction and wear in our human body, and we have biotribological contacts. I believe if we understand the fundamental aspects of friction and wear, then we can apply them and transfer them to other areas, which can be manufacturing, transportation or a lot of different applications.

Biomedical could be a topic, medicine could be a topic, materials design could be a topic, chemistry and physics. There's so much we can learn from tribology and apply it to other fields. I believe it's just opening the eyes a little bit more to the underlying phenomena in tribology, and then a lot of different fields can benefit.

The issue is that sometimes tribology is considered a niche discipline, and sometimes a lot of people think it's very old and something old-fashioned and is not useful today. But I have the feeling that the complete opposite is true, because it becomes more and more important today, and that's why I hope we will basically have this kind of renaissance of tribology in the near future, and then hopefully a lot of different disciplines can benefit from this highly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research discipline.

You can reach Andreas Rosenkranz at arosenkranz@ing.uchile.cl.