Dear colleague,
I am preparing a seminar that I will give at several universities, and I would be glad to offer it to your group as well, either online or, if you are able to invite me, in person.
The seminar is about recent theories of friction and frictional contact, viewed as a fracture problem. In the "Griffith friction" picture the edge of the stick zone is treated as a shear crack, and this explains why static friction depends on load, size and roughness. It covers:
• the elastic theory for spheres and rough surfaces, compared with recent experiments;
• new, still unpublished results on elastoplastic contact. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the tangential problem of a plastically run-in contact has been solved for loading, unloading and cyclic loading, including oscillating normal and tangential loads, with and without Griffith friction, and that its shakedown conditions have been found.
The talk is aimed mainly at PhD students and young researchers who want an entry point into this area of contact mechanics, but it should also interest colleagues working on tribology, fracture or contact.
I attach the slides (40 slides, PDF). If you are interested, I would be grateful for any feedback on the content, and we can then arrange a date and format that suit you.
With best regards,
Michele Ciavarella
Politecnico di Bari