The deformation and adhesion of randomly rough and patterned surfaces

Using a surface forces apparatus (SFA) and an atomic force microscope (AFM) we have studied the effects of surface roughness (root-mean-square (RMS) roughness between 0.3 and 220 nm) on the "contact mechanics", which describes the deformations and loading and unloading adhesion forces, of various polymeric surfaces. For randomly rough, moderately stiff, elastomeric surfaces, the force-distance curves on approach and separation are nearly reversible and almost perfectly exponentially repulsive, with an adhesion on separation that decreases only slightly with increasing RMS. Additionally, the magnitude of the preload force is seen to play a large role in determining the measured adhesion. The exponential repulsion likely arises from the local compressions (fine-grained nano- or submicron-scale deformations) of the surface asperities. The resulting characteristic decay lengths of the repulsion scale with the RMS roughness and correlate very well with a simple finite element method (FEM) analysis based on actual AFM topographical images of the surfaces. For "patterned" surfaces, with a nonrandom terraced structure, no similar exponential repulsion is observed, suggesting that asperity height variability or random roughness is required for the exponential behavior. However, the adhesion force or energy between two "patterned" surfaces fell off dramatically and roughly exponentially as the RMS increased, likely owing to a significant decrease in the contact area which in turn determines their adhesion. For both types of rough surfaces, random and patterned, the coarse-grained (global, meso- or macroscopic) deformations of the initially curved surfaces appear to be Hertzian.