Velocity-driven frictional sliding: Coarsening and steady-state pulse trains

Abstract

Frictional sliding is an intrinsically complex phenomenon, emerging from the interplay between driving forces, elasto-frictional instabilities, interfacial nonlinearity and dissipation, material inertia and bulk geometry. We show that homogeneous rate-and-state dependent frictional systems, driven at a prescribed boundary velocity -- as opposed to a prescribed stress -- in a range where the frictional interface is rate-weakening, generically host self-healing slip pulses, a sliding mode not yet fully understood. Such velocity-driven frictional systems are then shown to exhibit coarsening dynamics saturated at the system length in the sliding direction, independently of the system's height, leading to steadily propagating pulse trains. The latter may be viewed as a propagating phase-separated state, where slip and stick characterize the two phases. While pulse trains' periodicity is coarsening-limited by the system's length, the single pulse width, characteristic slip velocity and propagation speed exhibit rich properties, which are comprehensively understood using theory and extensive numerics. Finally, we show that for sufficiently small system heights, pulse trains are accompanied by periodic elasto-frictional instabilities.

18 page, 9 figures (including appendices)

References in corpus (3)

• Velocity-strengthening friction significantly affects interfacial dynamics, strength and dissipation
• Unconventional singularities, scale separation and energy balance in frictional rupture
• Theory of unconventional singularities of frictional shear cracks

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Correlation between slip precursors and topological length scales at the onset of frictional sliding
• Scaling theory for the statistics of slip at frictional interfaces
• Self-healing (solitonic) slip pulses in frictional systems
• The dynamics of unsteady frictional slip pulses
• A finite geometry, inertia assisted coarsening-to-complexity transition in homogeneous frictional systems