Copyright © 2011 Osama M. Abuzeid et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

To understand the tripological contact phenomena, both mathematical and experimental models are needed. In this work, fractal mathematical models are used to model the experimental results obtained from literature. Fractal geometry, using a deterministic Cantor structure, is used to model the surface topography, where recent advancements in thermoviscoelastic creep contact of rough surfaces are introduced. Various viscoelastic idealizations are used to model the surface materials, for example, Maxwell, Kelvin-Voigt, Standard Linear Solid and Jeffrey media. Such media are modelled as arrangements of elastic springs and viscous dashpots in parallel and/or in series. Asymptotic power laws, through hypergeometric series, were used to express the surface creep as a function of remote forces, body temperatures and time. The introduced models are valid only when the creep approach of the contact surfaces is in the order of the size of the surface roughness. The obtained results using such models, which admit closed-form solutions, are displayed graphically for selected values of the systems' parameters; the fractal surface roughness and various material properties. Results obtained showed good agreement with published experimental results, where the utilized methodology can be further extended to the utilization for the contact of surfaces within micro- and nano-electronic devices, circuits and systems.