Tamaas: a library for elastic-plastic contact of periodic rough surfaces

Abstract

Physical phenomena that happen at solid contact interfaces, such as friction and wear, are largely entwined with the roughness of the surfaces in contact. For example, the fact that the friction force between two solids in contact is independent of their apparent contact area is due to roughness, as the solids are only in contact over a smaller “true contact area” which only depends on the normal force (Archard, 1957). Roughness occurs on most man-made and natural surfaces (Persson, Albohr, Tartaglino, Volokitin, & Tosatti, 2005) and can span many orders of magnitude, from the nanometer scale to the kilometer scale (Renard, Candela, & Bouchaud, 2013). This poses a serious challenge to conventional numerical approaches in solid mechanics such as the finite-element method (FEM).