Sliding Onset of a Rigid Cylinder in Adhesive Contact with a Deformable Substrate

Abstract

Understanding the transition from contact to sliding at adhesive interfaces represents a fundamental challenge in tribology. Due to the lack of knowledge on the underlying microscopic mechanisms governing sliding onset, large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have been carried out in the present work to obtain the detailed process for sliding initiation. Nucleation of dislocation like defects has been discovered. Theoretical efforts have been made to characterize the nucleation and hence the static friction. Results reveal that tangential instability and dislocation nucleation compete to dominate the interfacial sliding onset.