Friction and wear depend critically on surface roughness and its evolution with time. An accurate control of roughness is essential to the performance and durability of virtually all engineering applications. At geological scales, roughness along tectonic faults is intimately linked to stick-slip behaviour as experienced during earthquakes. While numerous experiments on natural, fractured, and frictional sliding surfaces have shown that roughness has self-affine fractal properties, much less is known about the mechanisms controlling the origins and the evolution of roughness. Here, by performing long-timescale molecular dynamics simulations and tracking the roughness evolution in time, we reveal that the emergence of self-affine surfaces is governed by the interplay between the ductile and brittle mechanisms of adhesive wear in three-body contact, and is independent of the initial state.

In this review, we discuss our recent advances in modeling adhesive wear mechanisms using coarse-grained atomistic simulations. In particular, we present how a model pair potential reveals the transition from ductile shearing of an asperity to the formation of a debris particle. This transition occurs at a critical junction size, which determines the particle size at its birth. Atomistic simulations also reveal that for nearby asperities, crack shielding mechanisms result in a wear volume proportional to an effective area larger than the real contact area. As the density of microcontacts increases with load, we propose this crack shielding mechanism as a key to understand the transition from mild to severe wear. We conclude with open questions and a road map to incorporate these findings in mesoscale continuum models. Because these mesoscale models allow an accurate statistical representation of rough surfaces, they provide a simple means to interpret classical phenomenological wear models and wear coefficients from physics-based principles.

This paper analyzes fracturing in inhomogeneous media under dry and fully saturated conditions. We adopt a central force model with continuous damage to study avalanche behavior in a two-dimensional truss lattice undergoing dilation. Multiple fractures can develop at once and a power-law distribution of the avalanche size is observed. The values for the power-law exponent are compared with the ones found in the literature and scale-free behavior is suggested. The fracture evolves intermittently in time because only some avalanches correspond to fracture advancement. A fully saturated model with continuous damage based on the extended Biot's theory is developed and avalanche behavior is studied in the presence of fluid, varying the fluid boundary conditions. We show that power-law behavior is destroyed when the fluid flux governs the problem. Fluid pressure behavior during intermittent crack tip advancement is studied for the continuous-damage fully saturated model. It is found that when mechanical loading prevails, the pressure rises when the crack advances, while when fluid loading prevails, the pressure drops when the crack advances.

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