The influence of surface roughness and the contact pressure distribution on friction in rolling/sliding contacts

A numerical contact model is used to study the influence of surface roughness and the pressure distribution on the frictional behaviour in rolling/sliding contacts. Double-crowned roller surfaces are measured and used as input for the contact analysis. The contact pressure distribution is calculated for dry static contacts and the results are compared with friction measurements in a lubricated rolling/sliding contact made with a rough friction test rig. The mean pressure is suggested as a parameter that can be used to predict the influence of surface roughness on the friction coefficient in such contacts. The results show two important properties of the friction coefficient for the friction regime studied in this paper: (1) there is a linear decrease in friction coefficient as a function of the slide-to-roll ratio, and (2) the friction coefficient increases linearly with increasing mean contact pressure up to a maximum limit above which the friction coefficient is constant. The absolute deviation of experimental results from the derived theory is for most cases within 0.005.