AN FFT DETERMINISTIC SIMULATION OF ELASTIC ROUGH SURFACES IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL CONTACT AND MODEL ANALYSIS

For practicing engineers in industry it is important to have closed-form, easy to use equations that can be used to predict the real contact area, and relate it to friction, wear, adhesion, and electrical and thermal contact resistance. There are quite a few such models in the literature, but their agreement or their effectiveness has not been determined. This work will use several measured surface profiles to make predictions of contact area and contact force from many elastic contact models and compare them to a deterministic FFT based rough surface contact model. The results show that several of the models show good quantitative and qualitative agreement despite having very different mathematical foundations.