Transient Growth and Stick-Slip in Sliding Friction

Abstract

In linearly stable dynamical systems the non-normality of the corresponding linear operator is known to lead to transient growth of characteristic quantities, like, e.g., energy. For sliding friction systems it is shown in the present paper that this transient growth also applies to the sliding velocity and that under certain conditions this mechanism can lead to stick-slip limit-cycles in linearly stable system configurations.