Related papers: Why soft contacts are stickier when breaking than …
Adhesion plays a pivotal role in computer chip manufacturing, directly affecting the precision and durability of positioning components such as wafer stages. Electrical biasing is widely employed to eliminate floating potential and to…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
We study the lubricated contact of sliding soft surfaces that are locally patterned but globally cylindrical, held together under an external normal force. The local patterns represent either naturally occurring surface roughness or…
Hysterons are elementary units of hysteresis that underlie many complex behaviors of non-equilibrium matter. Because models of interacting hysterons can describe disordered matter, this suggests that artificial systems could respond to…
Dry adhesives rely on short-ranged intermolecular bonds, hence requiring a low elastic modulus to conform to the surface roughness of the adhered material. Under external loads, however, soft adhesives accumulate strain energy, which…
This study introduces novel insights into the development of procedures for identifying the most relevant scales for observing the interactions of dynamic wettability and surface complexities. The experimental procedures presented for…
We study the influence of the surface energy and contamination films on rubber adhesion and sliding friction. We find that there is a transfer of molecules from the rubber to the substrate which reduces the work of adhesion and makes the…
We study numerically local models for the mechanical contact between two solids with rough surfaces. When the solids softly touch either through adhesion or by a small normal load $L$, contact only forms at isolated patches and fluids can…
We consider an adhesive contact between a thin soft layer on a rigid substrate and a rigid cylindrical indenter ("line contact") with account of the surface tension of the layer. First, it is shown that the boundary condition for the…
How friction affects adhesion is addressed. The problem is considered in the context of a very stiff sphere adhering to a compliant, isotropic, linear elastic substrate, and experiencing adhesion and frictional slip relative to each other.…
Many biological systems can form strong adhesion to various materials with complex shapes. The adhesion is further switchable between strongly adhering and completely non-adhering in a simple and fast manner. By contrast, no engineering…
Contact angle hysteresis of a macroscopic droplet on a heterogeneous but flat substrate is studied using the interface displacement model. First, the apparent contact angle of a droplet on a heterogeneous surface under the condition of…
The contact between rough surfaces with adhesion is an extremely difficult problem, and the approximation of the DMT theory (to neglect deformations due to attractive forces), originally developed for spherical contact of very small radius,…
We develop an analytical theory of adhesive interaction of viscoelastic spheres in quasistatic approximation. Deformations and deformation rates are assumed to be small, which allows for the application of the Hertz contact theory, modified…
We have employed a numerical procedure to analyze the adhesive contact between a soft elastic layer and a rough rigid substrate. The solution of the problem is obtained by calculating the Green's function which links the pressure…
Recently, tribologists have shown increasing interest in rate-dependent phenomena occurring in viscoelastic fractures. However, in some cases, conflicting results are obtained despite the use of similar theoretical models. For this reason,…
Interaction between extended defects and impurities lies at the heart of many physical phenomena in materials science. Here we revisit the ubiquitous problem of the driven motion of an extended defect in a field of mobile impurities, which…
Atomistic simulations are used to test the equations of continuum contact mechanics in nanometer scale contacts. Nominally spherical tips, made by bending crystals or cutting crystalline or amorphous solids, are pressed into a flat, elastic…
The surface tension of compliant materials such as gels provides resistance to deformation in addition to and sometimes surpassing that due to elasticity. This article studies how surface tension changes the contact mechanics of a small…
Understanding the contact between solid surfaces is a long standing problem which has a strong impact on the physics of many processes such as adhesion, friction, lubrication and wear. Experimentally, the investigation of solid/solid…