On the accurate computation of the true contact-area in mechanical contact of random rough surfaces

Abstract

We introduce a corrective function to compensate errors in contact area computations coming from mesh discretization. The correction is based on geometrical arguments and requires only one additional quantity to be computed: the length of contact/non-contact interfaces. The new technique enables us to evaluate accurately the true contact area using a coarse mesh for which the shortest wavelength in the surface spectrum reaches the grid size. The validity of the approach is demonstrated for surfaces with different fractal dimensions and different spectral content using a properly designed mesh convergence test. In addition, we use a topology preserving smoothing technique to adjust the morphology of contact clusters obtained with a coarse grid.

17 pages

References in corpus (6)

• On the nature of surface roughness with application to contact mechanics, sealing, rubber friction and adhesion
• Contact mechanics for randomly rough surfaces
• Quantitative characterization of surface topography using spectral analysis
• A multiscale Molecular Dynamics approach to Contact Mechanics
• Contact between representative rough surfaces
• The contact of elastic regular wavy surfaces revisited

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The role of the roughness spectral breadth in elastic contact of rough surfaces
• Computational framework for monolithic coupling for thin fluid flow in contact interfaces
• Disk Harmonics for Analysing Curved and Flat Self-affine Rough Surfaces and the Topological Reconstruction of Open Surfaces
• Evolution of the contact between rough viscoelastic solids after decreasing loads: memory erasure and monotonic increase