Sliding Friction of an Adhesive Gel-sheet

Abstract

In this paper, we report our studies on sliding friction of an adhesive gel-sheet. Due to the stickiness of the gel, it never slips at the contact area but can make relative motions via the propagation of detachment waves. We found that the patterns of the detachment waves transform from regular stripe-like at larger pull velocities to irregular bubble-like at smaller pull velocities. Furthermore, from photo-elasticity experiments to visualize the stress state of the contact area, we discovered that the irregular bubble-like patterns are closely related to inhomogeneity in stress fields.