Adhesion and fracture; adhesion; contact mechanics; friction;

Usually, roughness destroys adhesion and this is one of the reasons why the "adhesion paradox", i.e. a "sticky Universe", is not real. However, at least with some special type of roughness, there is even the case of adhesion enhancement, as it was shown clearly by Guduru, who considered the contact between a sphere and a wavy axisymmetric single scale roughness, in the limit of short-range adhesion (JKR limit).

The interaction between contact area and frictional forces in adhesive soft contacts is receiving much attention in the scientific community due to its implications in many areas of engineering such as surface haptics and bioin-spired adhesives. In this work, we consider a soft adhesive sphere that is pressed against a rigid substrate and is sheared by a tangential force where the loads are transferred to the sphere through a normal and a tangential spring, representing the loading apparatus stiffness.

A new stickiness criterion for solids having random fractal roughness is derived using Persson's theory with DMT-type adhesion. As expected, we find stickiness, i.e., the possibility to sustain macroscopic tensile pressures or else non-zero contact area without load, is not affected by the truncation of the PSD spectrum of roughness at short wavelengths and can persist up to roughness amplitudes orders of magnitude larger than the range of attractive forces.

 Our research has just been published in Journal of Adhesion. It deals with axisymmetric frictionless adhesive contact problem for a spherical indenter pressed against an isotropic elastic incompressible half-space under equibiaxial stretching is studied in the framework of the generalized Johnson{Kendall{Roberts (JKR) theory, which accounts for the effect of weak coupling between fracture modes I and II by means of a phenomenological mode-mixity function. The model predicts that contact area can withstand a larger level of the substrate stretch under moderate pre-pulling force.

A. Papangelo, J. Scheibert, R. Sahli, G. Pallares, and M. Ciavarella
Phys. Rev. E 99, 053005 - https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.99.053005

Journal of The Royal Society Interface 16(151), February 2019.    DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2018.0738

Michele Ciavarella Junki Joe Junki Joe Antonio Papangelo James Richard Barber

Just published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Ciavarella M, Joe J, Papangelo A, Barber JR. 2019 The role of adhesion in contact mechanics. J. R. Soc. Interface 16: 20180738. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2018.0738

Abstract

The fundamental problem of friction in the presence of macroscopic adhesion, as in soft bodies, is receiving interest from many experimentalists. Since the first fracture mechanics 'purely brittle' model of Savkoor and Briggs, models have been proposed where the mixed mode toughness is interpreted with phenomenological fitting coefficients introducing weaker coupling between modes than expected by the "purely brittle" model.