Roughness

We are hiring 2 post-docs soon in Italy at the Department of Mechanics DMMM of the Politecnico di BARI.  The subject is here described.

dear collegues 

Static friction at fractal interfaces

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.triboint.2015.09.016

Contact stiffness of multiscale surfaces by truncation analysis

In this concise piece of work, an effective method is shown to gain new understandings into the role of surface structure in the field of contact mechanics. In particular, normal contact stiffness is correlated to parameters of surfaces' fractal dimension and amplitude. 

In 2007 I wrote a question in Imechanica, IS THERE NO PULL-OFF FOR ADHESIVE FRACTAL SURFACES?

Clearly, in 2007 this question was too hard to answer.  I pointed there that Fuller and Tabor 1975 asperity theory predicted a weird limit for a true fractal surface, that of no stickiness for any fractal dimension or amplitude, in the limit.

Dear Mechanicians,

a new project at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca (Lucca, Italy) has just been launched to create the first open access database of rough surfaces from nature and technology, see: 

http://musam.imtlucca.it/wikisurf.html

People are invited to contribute to the database by providing images of surfaces acquired using experimental techniques, as well as the corresponding elevation data field (raw x,y,z data in columns).