Loading…
Strength of adhesive contact between a rough fibrillar structure and an elastic body: influence of fibrillar stiffness
He, Xin; Li, Qiang; Popov, Valentin L.
Adhesive contact between a rough fibrillar structure and an elastic half space is numerically studied using the boundary element method. The fibrils are modelled as soft cylinders with constant stiffness and a Gaussian distribution of heights. Adhesive strength is obtained as a function of preload, roughness, and fibril stiffness. The adhesive strength after large enough preloading increases with decrease of fibril stiffness tending to a limiting value, which is independent of roughness. The present model aims to bridge the limiting cases of very rigid fibrils and extremely soft fibrils. In particular, we determined the stiffness needed to make the adhesion stress “tolerant” to the roughness, and an enhancement of adhesion is obtained by decreasing stiffness.
