Establishment of contact parameters from surface profiles

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Abstract
The problem of obtaining sufficient information from the profile of a rough surface, in order to predict the variation of the true contact area between it and a smooth surface as a function of load, is discussed. The effects of load and orientation on surface profiles were examined experimentally for anisotropic and several isotropic surfaces, all with randomly distributed surface heights, and the observations were analysed by computer. The results for the isotropic surfaces agree well with theory, while those for the anisotropic surface are consistent with proposed simple surface models. The variation of the number of contact spots per unit area with load was also measured directly. If an assumption is made concerning the original height distribution, the predictions for the number of contacts per unit area agree well with the experimental observations, while the discrepancy between theoretical predictions and experimental observations for the number of contacts per unit length is less than 4%.

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