Modelling of vibrations excited by formation and shearing of adhesive micro-junctions during sliding

Abstract

Understanding of the mechanism of “rubbing” noise and low amplitude friction exited vibration generation in steady sliding can be helped by models describing the contact interactions. In the current paper, we consider a simple microscopic contact model for surfaces in sliding, which is based on the adhesion theory of friction. In the proposed model, we consider that the formation and shearing of a junction contributes to a small change in the real contact area. The model incorporates random size and random spacing between junctions. We investigate the dependence of the instantaneous real contact area on the average size and number of junctions. We find that, from the viewpoint of vibration reduction, it is advantageous if the real contact area needed to support a given load is obtained as a sum of many small-sized micro-contacts, instead of few large-sized micro-contacts. The above result is in agreement with experimentally observed reduction of vibrations of a hard-disc slider after texturing.

Keywords:

• Dynamic modeling
• Adhesion
• Junction
• rictional excitation
• vibration

Additional information

Notes on contributors

B L Stoimenov

Dr Boyko Stoimenov is a research scientist at the Bio-mimetic Control Research Center of RIKEN Institute in Japan. He obtained his ME in mechanical rngineering from the Higher School of Transport in Sofia, Bulgaria. He earned a PhD in Tribology at Tohoku University on the subject of frictional sound generation as a Japanese Ministry of Education Scholar. His diverse research interests include the dynamics of contact interfaces, bio-inspiration and biomimetics in mechanical systems, especially, silent mechanical actuation by electro-active polymers, better known as “artificial muscles”. Boyko has authored a number of scientific publications and patents in these fields. He is often invited to talk about frictional sound generation and “artificial muscles” by universities and industry.

T Mukai

Dr Toshiharu Mukai has been the head of the Biologically Integrative Sensors Laboratory in RIKEN, Japan, since 2001. He received his BEng, MEng and DrEng degrees from the University of Tokyo in 1990, 1992 and 1995, respectively. He was a research scientist in RIKEN, from 1995 to 2000. He stayed in CNRS, France, as a postdoctoral fellow, from 2000 to 2001. His current research interests include sensor information processing, robotics, neural interfaces and artificial muscles.