"Tribo-Fatigue" Is this fringe pseudoscience or actual science?
Recently, while reading the wikipedia article on entropy, I came across "Tribo-fatigue entropy" in the interdisciplinary applications section this section seemed suspicious to me; even though there are a lot of mathematical symbols and equations that on the surface seem fine, everything written there has a strange "fringy" quality that makes me suspect it is not really science. Furthermore, all citations correspond to the same russian scientist, someone named "<PERSON>", who is supposed to be the creator of a discipline called tribo-fatigue, which I also find suspicious but "scientific on the surface". Because of this, I flagged this content as dubious.
My question is: Is this actually a legit branch of mechanics/thermodynamics that just hasn't caught on in the west? or is this pseudoscience masquerading as the real thing through lots of equations and complex jargon?
I am currently reading some of this material, and I'm almost certain it is the latter, but I thought I would ask here and see if there is anyone who is familiar with it, I wouldn't want to make the mistake of disregarding this as nonesense maybe due to some translation issues that make it difficult to understand and/or prejudice towards less mainstream science before giving it a chance first.
Here I show some examples of strange formulas in the article, taken straight from wikipedia:
"Entropic interpretation of damage" (?)
$$(d_i S){TF} = \frac{\gamma_1^{(w)}}{T\Sigma} \omega_\Sigma dV_{P\gamma}$$
"Change in entropy in a mecanothermodynamic system given by thermodynamic and tribo-fatigue entropies" (?)
\begin{align} dS_{MTD} &= \left[(dS){TD} \rightleftarrows (d_i S){TF}\right] \ &= \Lambda_{TD\backslash TF} \left[\left(\frac{dU + p\,dV}{T} - \frac{1}{T}\sum_1^n{\mu\,dN_k}\right){TD} + \left(\gamma_1^{(w)}\frac{\omega\Sigma}{T_\Sigma}dV_{P\gamma}\right)_{TF} \right] \uparrow , \Lambda \lesseqgtr 1. \ \end{align}
What are the double "equilibrium" arrow, the upwards arrow, the "greater, equal or smaller than 1" and the $\Lambda$? This strange proliferation of nonstandard notation seems certainly suspicious to me, I would have been fine with one or two of those on their own, but this seems overkill. 1020
However, at least part of the equation is clearly right, it does represent thermodynamic entropy correctly, and I suppose the strange notation can also have developed due to the isolation of the discipline from more mainstream thermodynamics, so I'm also prepared to be proven wrong.
Update: The fact that this russian scientist, according to tribo-fatigue, has papers like "On the possibility of quantitative analysis of good and evil in socio-humanitarian studies" (Ref 62) and "The dialectics of life" (Ref 60) raises some more red flags I think.
Update: I found a non-paywalled paper in english, the journal certainly feels predatory (MDPI entropy) but I could be wrong. I took a glance at the first part of the paper and at least some of the intermediate steps in the equations/derivations seem like they make some sense, but things start to get very complex very quickly, the notation is very nonstandard and self-citations consume most of the paper. At the end of the paper there are two statements which sound extremely pseudoscientific, one of them reads
Effective energy (entropy) flow caused by different-nature sources are non-additive -- They interact dialectically in time
The other one reads
Damage of everything that exists has no conceivable limits
Part of the explanation associated with this last one is:
This corresponds to the philosophical concept that matter and motion are eternal, but the damageability is the fundamental property and the duty of all systems, including living and intelligent
This certainly is very far fetched. I find this fascinating because it seems very strange to me that something as innocent as the study of friction can give way to claims like this, and also because most of the mathematics looks like it makes some sense, and there are very few claims like this that I could find. 273