The Technical University of Silesia is located in Gliwice, some 300 km south-west of Warsaw. Established in 1276, Gliwice is one of a cluster of towns in the relatively small and densely populated (approximately 3.5 million) region of Upper Silesia, which is the industrial heartland of Poland. The Technical University of Silesia was founded in 1945. There are eleven faculties: architecture, electronic, civil, chemical, electrical, mining, environmental, physics, mechanical, materials, and production engineering, with 14,400 full-time engineering students and a teaching staff of about 1,800, including ninety-nine professors.Research and development projects play an important part in the university and reflect the range of courses on offer. The institutes and chairs which form part of every faculty are equipped with research laboratories. These include the Industrial Tribology Laboratory located within the Institute of Mining Mechanisation. The Industrial Tribology Laboratory is active in certain aspects of this interdisciplinary field, notably, the tribology of brake friction materials, tribology in belt conveyors and rope hoists, abrasion and erosion, the contamination and degradation of lubricants, and the performance and reliability of lubricated systems.
RESEARCH ACTlVlTlESTribology does not have a long tradition at the Technical University of Silesia, but it is appropriate to mention Professor C. Kajdas and Professor L. Muller, who, in the 1960s and early 1970s, conducted experimental and theoretical work on boundary lubrication, EHD lubrication, wear in gears, and condition monitoring in gear transmissions. Current activities in tribology include: