The Distribution of Microcontact Area, Load, Pressure, and Flash Temperature Under the Greenwood-Williamson Model

Abstract

Microcontact models provide average values of the random interfacial load, area and pressure between rough contacting surfaces. They do not provide a measure of the variability about that average. Events of tribological importance, however, are likely to be dependent on extreme rather than average behavior conditions. In this paper Monte Carlo simulation is used to determine the 75th and 90th percentiles of three dimensionless random variables as a function of the dimensionless separation of two contacting rough surfaces. These values may be used to determine the corresponding percentiles under the Greenwood-Williamson microcontact model of the distributions of 1) real contact area fraction, 2) the radius of the microcontact area, 3) microcontact load, 4) the maximum microcontact pressure and 5) the asperity flash temperature under low speed sliding conditions. A numerical example illustrates the computations.