Frictional contact of elastomer materials on rough rigid surfaces

Frictional phenomena can be observed in many industrial and commonplace problems. They are often fundamental for the understanding of technical processes. Nevertheless the neglection of friction is in many cases the first step in modelling. If thought has been given to friction at all, mostly {\sc Coulombs} law is used, which implies a constant friction coefficient $\mu$ depending on experiences with the respective material pairing. This assumption is sufficient for many applications in structural mechanics; however it holds only for rigid bodies. As our aim is the investigation of rubber friction on rough surfaces, it is obvious that the use of {\sc Coulombs} law produces wrong results in this case. The rubber will undergo very large strains on the surface asperitites and its deformations can not at all be neglected. The real physical interactions between tire and road surface are very complex and still widely unknown. As it is apparent from experiments, the friction coefficient depends heavily on various parameters like sliding velocity, surface roughness, normal forces and temperature change. During practical experiments it is impossible to seperate these effects from each other and therefore very difficult to predicate special dependances. Numerical simulations may help to isolate the different influences and offer a clearer view on the fundamental principles of rubber friction.

This project is part of a research group, wich is fully financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG)