The influence of the statistical properties of self-affine surfaces in elastic contacts: A numerical investigation

In the last years, an increasing number of papers has been published in the field of contact mechanics between rough fractal surfaces. The increase in research is motivated by the wide variety of natural and industrial processes that involve formation of rough surfaces and interfaces, characterized by self-similarity or self-affine properties on multiple scales. In this paper, the contact between a linear elastic half-space and a rough self-affine fractal rigid surface is studied by employing a numerical method recently developed by the authors (Putignano et al., 2012). The paper aims at investigating the influence of surface parameters as fractal dimensions, mean square slope and mean square roughness on the relation between the contact area, the load and the average separation. The results show that, for relatively small loads, the real contact area–load relationship coefficient of proportionality κκ takes the universal value κ=2κ=2 independent of the statistical properties and fractal dimension Df of the rough surface. This universal constant is just in between the two values predicted respectively by Bush et al. (1975) and Persson (2001). We also find that the average separation vs. load relation is affected by the fractal dimension Df of the rough surface, as higher Df lead to an increase of the average separation. Finally, in this work, we also study the behavior of the power spectral densities of the elastically deformed surface and of the distribution of local separations. We find that the trend of this quantities is in agreement with recent theoretical predictions.