An ingenious work on contact mechanics by Föppl and Schubert went into oblivion due to the Second World War
The history of science sometimes reads like a detective novel. The personal destinies sometimes lead to the fact that outstanding, ingenious works which were decades ahead of their time, sink into oblivion. This seems to have happened with the publications...
Physics of Contact and Adhesion with application to biological systems – ICTP Colloquium
A talk by Professor Bo Persson on contact mechanics and adhesion in biological systems. Abstract: One of the weakest forces in nature is the van der Waals interaction which acts between all atoms and solids. Still on a macroscopic level...
Should the contact area really increase due to sliding, and why this is never observed?
Abstract A paper by Menga, Carbone & Dini (MCD) recently published in prestigeous journal, suggests that in the contact with adhesion, the effect of tangential forces, and in particular of shear stresses assumed constant at the interface and equal to...
Golden Age of Tribology?
Recently, a paper titled “Is Tribology Approaching Its Golden Age? Grand Challenges in Engineering Education and Tribological Research” appeared in Frontiers | Tribology journal. The author, Valentin Popov, Professor at TU Berlin, puts forward and discusses two fundamental problems of...
Contact Mechanics Book
The Handbook on Contact Mechanics (Handbuch der Kontaktmechanik) co-authored by Honorary Professor of Tomsk Polytechnic University, head of the Department of System Dynamics and Friction Physics at Technical University Berlin, Valentin Popov, a TPU alumnus Emanuel Willert, and Assistant Professor...
Some open problems in adhesion (of rough surfaces)
By M.Ciavarella, A. Papangelo. Politecnico di BARI, Italy. Adhesion for ‘‘soft’’ bodies shows instabilities like in the simple case of a single sinusoid even in the so called JKR regime (Johnson 1995) which leads to hysteretic behavior. Hence, for very...
Contact Area vs. Load: Simple Scaling Laws
"God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil", a Nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli said. In tribology, as in many other sciences, surface features (asperities, roughness) play an important role. In many cases, the surface roughness dramatically...
