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Friction and fracture

Nature volume 413, pages 285–288 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Consider a block placed on a table and pushed sideways until it begins to slide. Amontons and Coulomb found that the force required to initiate sliding is proportional to the weight of the block (the constant of proportionality being the static coefficient of friction), but independent of the area of contact1. This is commonly explained by asserting that, owing to the presence of asperities on the two surfaces, the actual area in physical contact is much smaller than it seems, and grows in proportion to the applied compressive force1. Here we present an alternative picture of the static friction coefficient, which starts with an atomic description of surfaces in contact and then employs a multiscale analysis technique to describe how sliding occurs for large objects. We demonstrate the existence of self-healing cracks2,3,4 that have been postulated to solve geophysical paradoxes about heat generated by earthquakes5,6,7,8,9,10,11,25,26,27, and we show that, when such cracks are present at the atomic scale, they result in solids that slip in accord with Coulomb's law of friction. We expect that this mechanism for friction will be found to operate at many length scales, and that our approach for connecting atomic and continuum descriptions will enable more realistic first-principles calculations of friction coefficients.

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Figure 1: Numerical simulation of a self-healing crack travelling through a compressed strip.
Figure 2: Catalogue of shear σxy(∞) and compressive -σyy(∞) stresses, applied to infinitely large systems, that support steadily moving self-healing cracks.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Swinney for suggestions on presentation. This work was supported by the NSF and by a fellowship from TICAM at The University of Texas at Austin.

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  1. Computational and Applied Mathematics and Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, 78712, Texas, USA

    Eric Gerde & M. Marder

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  1. Eric Gerde
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  2. M. Marder
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Correspondence to M. Marder.

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Gerde, E., Marder, M. Friction and fracture. Nature 413, 285–288 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35095018

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