Adhesion and fracture; adhesion; contact mechanics; friction; viscoelasticity

Just published on JMPS

AbstractHigh-frequency micrometrical vibrations have been shown to greatly influence the adhesive performance of soft interfaces, however a detailed comparison between theoretical predictions and experimental results is still missing. Here, the problem of a rigid spherical indenter, hung on a soft spring, that is unloaded from an adhesive viscoelastic vibrating substrate is considered. The experimental tests were performed by unloading a borosilicate glass lens from a soft PDMS substrate excited by high-frequency micrometrical vibrations.

In classical experiments, it has been found that a rigid cylinder can roll both on and under an inclined rubber plane with a friction force that depends on a power law of velocity, independent of the sign of the normal force. Further, contact area increases significantly with velocity with a related power law.

The problem of the detachment of a flat indenter from a plane adhesive viscoelastic strip of thickness “b” is studied.

The problem of the detachment of a sufficiently large flat indenter from a plane adhesive viscoelastic strip of thickness “b” is studied. For any given retraction speed, three different detachment regimes are found: (i) for very small “b” the detachment stress is constant and equal to the theoretical strength of the interface, (ii) for intermediate values of “b” the detachment stress decays approximately as b−1/2, (iii) for thick layers a constant detachment stress is obtained corresponding to case the punch is detaching from a halfplane.

Viscoelastic materials are receiving increasing attention in soft robots and pressure sensitive adhesives design, but also in passive damping techniques in automotive and aerospace industry. Here, by using the correspondence principle originally developed by Lee and Radok and further extended by Ting and Greenwood, we transform the elastic solutions of Persson for contact of nominally flat but randomly rough surfaces to viscoelastic indentation. As an example, the cases of step loading and of the response to a single cycle of harmonic loading are studied.