Friction is one of those invisible taxes that industry pays every single day without anyone noticing. Every rotating gear, every bearing, every engine component that rubs against another loses energy to heat and wear — and globally, friction and wear are estimated to account for a meaningful share of all energy consumed by mechanical systems. Cutting that loss, even by a small percentage, adds up to enormous energy savings at scale.
That’s the problem a team of researchers at the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology (IASST) in Guwahati just made real progress on — not with an exotic synthetic chemical, but by mixing a vanishingly small amount of a two-dimensional nanomaterial called borophene into castor oil.
The Result: 42% Less Friction, From 0.1% of an Additive
The Department of Science and Technology (DST), which supported the research, announced the findings on 22 July 2026. The headline number is striking in its simplicity: adding just 0.1 weight percent of borophene to castor oil reduced friction by roughly 42% compared to using the plain oil alone. The team, led by Prof. Devasish Chowdhury with Ujjibit Boruah as first author, has published the work in the journal ACS Applied Engineering Materials.
Castor oil is already an attractive lubricant base on its own — it’s renewable, biodegradable, and doesn’t carry petroleum’s supply-chain and disposal baggage. But on its own, plain castor oil isn’t as effective at reducing friction and wear as the synthetic, often petroleum-derived, lubricant additives used in industry today. The IASST team set out to close that performance gap using an additive that doesn’t undo the environmental benefit of using a plant-based oil in the first place.
Why Borophene, Specifically
Borophene is a single-atom-thick sheet of boron atoms — a close cousin, structurally, to graphene, the famous 2D carbon material. It’s been explored for potential in batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells, but its use as a lubricant additive hadn’t been tested before this study.
Conventional lubricant additives face a frustrating trade-off: additives that stop metal parts from corroding often interfere with the chemical reactions that reduce friction at the point of contact, and vice versa. The IASST team found that borophene sidesteps this problem elegantly. Dispersed in castor oil without any chemical modification, the nanomaterial forms what researchers call a “tribofilm” — a thin, durable protective layer made of iron oxides, carbon-based compounds, and boron compounds — at the point where two surfaces meet and rub against each other. That film reduces shear stress, improves how well the surfaces bear load, and cuts down wear, all at once.
In simpler terms: instead of fighting corrosion and friction as two separate problems requiring two separate fixes, one low-cost intervention solved both, using a material that’s added in such small quantities that castor oil remains, for practical purposes, the dominant substance in the mixture.
From Lab Bench to Real Machines
This isn’t a purely theoretical result. The DST release frames the work as having direct relevance to renewable energy systems, marine applications, and sustainable manufacturing — sectors where reducing energy loss to friction has both a cost and a carbon benefit. Wind turbine gearboxes, marine engines, and industrial machinery all depend on lubricants that need to perform reliably over long operating lifespans, and any material that extends that lifespan while cutting energy loss has value well beyond a single lab.
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what stage this research is at. A published, peer-reviewed lab result showing a 42% friction reduction with a novel nanomaterial additive is a genuinely significant scientific finding — but scaling borophene production cost-effectively, and validating performance across the huge variety of real-world industrial conditions, is a separate and much longer journey. Most breakthrough lubricant additives take years to move from a university lab to an industrial supply chain, if they get there at all.
Why This Kind of Research Deserves More Attention
Clean energy conversations tend to focus on solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles — the visible, headline-grabbing hardware of the energy transition. Research like this is a reminder that a huge amount of the energy transition is actually about efficiency: making the machines we already have waste less energy, rather than only building new ones that generate cleaner power.
A biodegradable, plant-derived lubricant that performs competitively with synthetic alternatives — while requiring only a tiny fraction of a gram of an exotic additive — is exactly the kind of unglamorous but genuinely useful innovation that a resource-constrained, manufacturing-heavy economy like India needs more of. It reduces industrial energy consumption, cuts dependence on petroleum-based lubricant additives, and does it using a domestically developed material rather than an imported one.
For a country trying to decarbonise a huge and diverse industrial base — not just its power grid — sustainable technology breakthroughs like this one, quietly published out of a research institute in Guwahati, are as much a part of the climate story as any solar park or EV factory.
Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India — Borophene-based green lubricant can help save energy