Frictional Contact of Rubber on rough Surfaces

The aim of this work is to investigate the frictional behaviour of rubber on rough rigid surfaces. Rubber friction is composed of hysteretic and adhesional effects. The main focus lies on the hysteresis theory which motivates rubber friction with the internal damping inside the viscoelastic material. It is necessary to perform a multiscale analysis to regard the roughness of the surface on all important length scales. The fractal surface is approximated by a superposition of harmonic functions. The simulations will start at the lowest wavelength and proceed to larger scales by replacing the smaller roughness with the ascertained friction law. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)