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Contact area
The contact area depends on the geometry of the contacting bodies, the load, and the material properties. The contact area between the two parallel cylinders is a narrow rectangle. Two, non-parallel cylinders have an elliptical contact area, unless the cylinders are crossed at 90 degrees, in which case they have a circular contact area. Two spheres also have a circular contact area.
Friction and contact area
It is an empirical fact for many materials that F = μN, where F is the frictional force for sliding friction, μ is the coefficient of friction, and N is the normal force. There isn't a simple derivation for sliding friction's independence from area.
Methods for determining contact area
One way of determining the actual contact area is to determine it indirectly through a physical process that depends on contact area. For example, the resistance of a wire is dependent on the cross-sectional area, so one may find the contact area of a metal by measuring the current that flows through that area (through the surface of an electrode to another electrode, for example.)
References
References
- (2015). "Stress-Dependent Electrical Contact Resistance at Fractal Rough Surfaces". Journal of Engineering Mechanics.
This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.
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