Understanding the Mechanism of Load-Carrying Capacity between Parallel Rough Surfaces through a Deterministic Mixed Lubrication Model

Experimental results have confirmed that parallel rough surfaces can be separated by a full fluid film. However, such a lift-off effect is not expected by the traditional Reynolds theory. This paper proposes a deterministic mixed lubrication model to understand the mechanism of the lift-off effect. The proposed model considered the interaction between asperities and the micro-elastohydrodynamic lubrication (micro-EHL) at asperities within parallel rough surfaces for the first time. The proposed model is verified by predicting the measured Stribeck curve taken from literature and experiments conducted in this work. The simulation results highlight that the micro-EHL effect at the asperity scale is critical in building load-carrying capacity between parallel rough surfaces. Finally, the drawbacks of the proposed model are addressed and the directions of future research are pointed out.

Radar Imaging Statistics of Non-Gaussian Rough Surface: A Physics-Based Simulation Study

This paper investigates the radar image statistics of rough surfaces by simulating the scattered signal’s dependence on the surface roughness. Statistically, the roughness characteristics include the height probability density (HPD) and, to the second-order, the power spectral density (PSD). We simulated the radar backscattered signal by computing the far-field scattered field from the rough surface within the antenna beam volume in the context of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. To account for the non-Gaussian height distribution, we consider microscopic details of the roughness on comparable radar wavelength scales to include specularly, singly, and multiply scatterers. We introduce surface roughness index (RSI) to distinguish the statistical characteristics of rough surfaces with different height distributions. Results suggest that increasing the RMS height does not impact the Gaussian HPD surface but significantly affects the Weibull surface. The results confirm that as the radar frequency increases, or reaches a relatively larger roughness, the surface’s HPD causes significant changes in incoherent scattering due to more frequent multiple scattering contributions. As a result, the speckle move further away from the Rayleigh model. By examining individual RSI, we see that the Gaussian HPD surface is much less sensitive to RMS height than the Weibull HPD surface. We demonstrate that to retrieve the surface parameters (both dielectric and roughness) from the estimated RCS, less accuracy is expected for the non-Gaussian surface than the Gaussian surface under the same conditions. Therefore, results drawn from this study are helpful for system performance evaluations, parameters estimation, and target detection for SAR imaging of a rough surface.

The Contact Mechanics for Indentation of Single Asperity and Rough Surfaces

A Finite Element Analysis of a rigid sphere contact with a deformable elastic-plastic plat called indentation model is studied. The numerical results are applied on the rough surfaces contact of the GW model. A series of the relationships of the rough surfaces contact parameters are obtained. The contact parameters of the indentation model and the flattening model are compared in detail and the reasons for their differences are analyzed. In the case of single asperity contact, for ω/ωc > 1, the Indentation model reaches the initial plastic yield while the flattening model is ω/ωc = 1. In ω/ωc = 10, the plastic yield reaches the contact surface for the first time, and the corresponding point of ψ = 0.5 the flattening model is relatively earlier in . The contact parameters of rough surface in different plasticity indexes are compared again. On the point of ω/ωc = 6, the contact parameters of the flattening model and the indentation model coincide perfectly. For 0.5 < ψ < 4, the difference between the parameters curves become larger and larger. To the point of ψ = 4, when the distance difference reaches the maximum, it begins to decrease until the two curves are close to coincide again. The dimensionless elastic-plastic contact hardness is introduced. The relation between real contact area and the contact pressure of the indentation model can be acquired quickly. The results show that the geometric shape of deformable contact parts has an important effect on the contact parameters, especially for the extension of plastic deformation region within a specific range of plasticity index.