Meeting the Contact-Mechanics Challenge

• Published in: Tribology letters Vol. 65; no. 4; pp. 1 - 18
• Main Authors: Müser, Martin H., Dapp, Wolf B., Bugnicourt, Romain, Sainsot, Philippe, Lesaffre, Nicolas, Lubrecht, Ton A., Persson, Bo N. J., Harris, Kathryn, Bennett, Alexander, Schulze, Kyle, Rohde, Sean, Ifju, Peter, Sawyer, W. Gregory, Angelini, Thomas, Ashtari Esfahani, Hossein, Kadkhodaei, Mahmoud, Akbarzadeh, Saleh, Wu, Jiunn-Jong, Vorlaufer, Georg, Vernes, András, Solhjoo, Soheil, Vakis, Antonis I., Jackson, Robert L., Xu, Yang, Streator, Jeffrey, Rostami, Amir, Dini, Daniele, Medina, Simon, Carbone, Giuseppe, Bottiglione, Francesco, Afferrante, Luciano, Monti, Joseph, Pastewka, Lars, Robbins, Mark O., Greenwood, James A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.12.2017; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Adhesion; Asperity; Chemistry and Materials Science; Computer simulation; Contact mechanics; Corrosion and Coatings; Elastic properties; Flat surfaces; Interfacial stresses; Materials Science; Mechanics; Mechanics (physics); Modeling; Molecular dynamics; Nanotechnology; Nominally flat surfaces; Original Paper; Physical Chemistry; Physics; Special Issue: The Contact-Mechanics Challenge; Stress concentration; Structural mechanics; Substrates; Surfaces and Interfaces; Theoretical and Applied Mechanics; Thin Films; Tribology; Nominally flat surfaces; Adhesion; Modeling; Contact mechanics
• ISSN: 1023-8883; 1573-2711; 1573-2711
• DOI: 10.1007/s11249-017-0900-2

This paper summarizes the submissions to a recently announced contact-mechanics modeling challenge. The task was to solve a typical, albeit mathematically fully defined problem on the adhesion between nominally flat surfaces. The surface topography of the rough, rigid substrate, the elastic properties of the indenter, as well as the short-range adhesion between indenter and substrate, were specified so that diverse quantities of interest, e.g., the distribution of interfacial stresses at a given load or the mean gap as a function of load, could be computed and compared to a reference solution. Many different solution strategies were pursued, ranging from traditional asperity-based models via Persson theory and brute-force computational approaches, to real-laboratory experiments and all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of a model, in which the original assignment was scaled down to the atomistic scale. While each submission contained satisfying answers for at least a subset of the posed questions, efficiency, versatility, and accuracy differed between methods, the more precise methods being, in general, computationally more complex. The aim of this paper is to provide both theorists and experimentalists with benchmarks to decide which method is the most appropriate for a particular application and to gauge the errors associated with each one.