Roughness Effects in Thermo-Mechanically Loaded Contacts

Abstract

A recently developed thermo-mechanical model was used to investigate the influence of surface roughness characteristics on the maximum contact temperature rise as well as shear stresses in rough surface contacts subjected to normal and tangential loading. In order to identify prevailing trends clearly the surfaces were modelled as having idealised sinusoidal roughness. Following a brief description of the numerical model, results are presented to illustrate the dependence of contact temperature and stresses on roughness parameters such as wavelength and amplitude as well as the contact Peclet number. An attempt is made to explain the observed trends in terms of variation in predicted pressure distribution and real contact areas for different surfaces.

Failure by deformation in the lateral contact between sinusoidal asperities

“…Relative to study of contact between asperities, with the sine profile, most studies have focused on obtaining actual areas and pressures considering elastic surface contact primarily with initial contact at the top of the asperities, examples are works in Persson, 20 Persson and Tosatti, 21 Ciavarella et al, 22 and Nyqvist et al 23 Complementing the idea of initial contact at the top, in this article, we consider lateral contact as another probable contact form when a pair of asperities coincides; so, it is a primordial condition of study.…”