An Integrated Mechanical–Electrical Predictive Model of Electrical Contact Resistance between Two Rough Surfaces

Abstract

This article introduces a novel approach for predicting the electrical contact resistance (ECR) between two rough surfaces based on a combination of contact modeling with surface topography analysis. Firstly, asperities distributed on rough surfaces are simulated as parabolas. An asperity shoulder-shoulder contact model is developed, which is similar to the well-known Kogut-Etsion (KE) model but requires extended capability regarding different degrees of contact misalignment. On the basis of such a contact model, Holm's principle is then incorporated to create a new theoretical formulation revealing the constitutive relations between the ECR and the deformation patterns of microcontacts arising at the contact interface. Then, a watershed approach is employed to get the contact surface topographies with which an iterative computational strategy is then proposed to alleviate the programming and computing efforts for implementing the calculation of the total ECR at the contact interface. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, aiming at one case, the KE-based model is reviewed and compared numerically to the new model. The comparison shows good agreement between the two models. A slight difference is that the suggested model gives a relative lower estimation on the ECR value, which is mainly attributed to the different judgment of the deformation mechanism.

KEY WORDS:

• Electrical Contact Resistance
• Contact Mechanics
• Predictive Model