Paper VT-WeA9
Single Asperity Contact and Sliding

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 5:00 pm, Room 20

Abstract: Nanoscale probes are widely used for surface and material characterization as well as for emerging nanoscale manufacturing techniques; they also are model single asperities and so provide a means of studying contact and relative motion between surfaces at a fundamental level. The challenge in understanding such phenomena is that experimentally-observed properties are determined by processes that occur within the interface between two materials. As such, it is desirable to complement experiments with simulations that can provide insight into the atomic-scale mechanisms within that buried interface. However, there are challenges to modeling nanoscale probe-based experiments with sufficient accuracy that the simulations can be used to explain experimental observables. We have addressed this issue in recent work by designing models to reproduce specific experiments in which nanoscale probes are used to characterize contact, friction and wear. We focus on tractable problems for which optimally-matched simulations can be directly validated by comparison to experiments and the simulations can in turn provide insight into the fundamental mechanisms underlying contact and sliding at the nanoscale.