Effective macroscopic adhesive contact behavior induced by small surface roughness

In this paper we study a model contact problem involving adhesive elastic frictionless contact between rough surfaces. The problem's most notable feature is that it captures the phenomenon of depth-dependent-hysteresis (DDH) (e.g., see Kesari et al., 2010), which refers to the observation of different contact forces during the loading and unloading stages of a contact experiment. We specifically study contact between a rigid axi-symmetric punch and an elastic half-space. The roughness is represented as arbitrary periodic undulations in the punch's radial profile. These undulations induce multiple equilibrium contact regions between the bodies at each indentation-depth. Assuming that the system evolves so as to minimize its potential energy, we show that different equilibrium contact regions are selected during the loading and unloading stages at each indentation-depth, giving rise to DDH. When the period and amplitude of our model's roughness is reduced, we show that the evolution of the contact force and radius with the indentation-depth can be approximated with simpler curves, the effective macroscopic behavior, which we compute. Remarkably, the effective behavior depends solely on the amplitude and period of the model's roughness. The effective behavior is useful for estimating material properties from contact experiments displaying DDH. We show one such example here. Using the effective behavior for a particular roughness model (sinusoidal) we analyze the energy loss during a loading/unloading cycle, finding that roughness can toughen the interface. We also estimate the energy barriers between the different equilibrium contact regions at a fixed indentation-depth, which can be used to assess the importance of ambient energy fluctuations on DDH.