Friction of a Rubber Wedge Sliding on Glass

The contact width, and hence contact area, for an elastic wedge pressed against a rigid flat surface appears to be proportional to the applied load per unit length. For a particular rubber sample, the reciprocal of the constant of proportionality, i.e., the mean normal pressure, was 130 kPa, i.e., about 7% of the tensile modulus E of the material. It was also independent of sliding speed over the range examined. Thus, a sharp wedge gave a relatively high loading pressure, independent of the applied load. As a result, the coefficient of friction was also independent of applied load over a wide range. The coefficient of friction was measured for a wedge of an unfilled natural rubber vulcanizate over wide ranges of sliding speed (50 µm/s to 100 mm/s) and test temperature (3°C to 63°C). It was found to increase with sliding speed and decrease with temperature over these ranges. The results at different temperatures were superposable using the WLF rate-temperature equivalence to create a master curve of friction vs. reduced sliding speed, rising from a value of about 1.5 at high temperatures and low speeds to about 5 at low temperatures and high speeds. Chlorination of a thin surface region reduced the coefficient of friction and its dependence on speed and temperature. It then became similar to that typically found for thermoplastics, 0.4 to 0.7. The geometry of sliding a flexible strip against a rigid curved surface caused high values of the apparent coefficient of friction to be obtained at relatively small departures from normal loading. In an extreme case, frictional seizure was observed when a high-friction sample contacted the glass surface at an angle of about 15° to the direction of loading. The apparent coefficient of friction then became indefinitely large. This same phenomenon of abnormally large frictional effects would be expected to occur in the case of conventional windshield-wiper blades, sliding over curved glass windshields.