Dry and Wet Contact Modeling of Multilayered Rough Solid Surfaces

Abstract

Adhesion, friction/stiction, and wear are among the main issues in various commercial applications, including magnetic storage devices, microelectromechanical systems, and nanoelectromechanical systems, having contact interfaces with normal or tangential motion. The contact analysis of multilayered structures under both dry and wet conditions with and without relative motion, which simulates the actual contact situations of the devices, is needed to obtain optimum design parameters, including materials with desired mechanical properties and layer thicknesses. The contact analyses have been used to predict the contact pressure profile on the interface and contact statistics, namely, fractional contact area, the [value of contact pressure, von Mises, principal tensile and shear stresses, and relative meniscus force. The early work does not consider surface roughness and this has been carried out in the later studies for single and multilayered solid surfaces. A numerical three-dimensional multilayered rough contact model is presented in detail to investigate the effects of roughness, stiffness, hardness, layer thicknesses, load, coefficient of friction, and meniscus contribution. Applications of the model to magnetic storage devices are presented.