The influence of roughness on friction: Part I: The influence of a single step

Part I of this paper series presents experiments whose goal is to reveal a correlation between roughness and friction force for contact areas on the micrometer scale. An elastic deformation model was developed to describe this correlation. This model concentrates on friction processes which are dominated by elastic deformation. The experiments were performed on defined model tribosystems with a tribometer of our own design equipped with an atomic force microscope (AFM) and an optical microscope. The samples were silicon wafers whose roughness was created by lithography and the counter bodies were balls of different materials. In contrast to part II the roughness of the samples consists only of a single step. In part II the elastic deformation model will be tested on roughness with two and more steps inside the contact area. Finally, the model will be validated on a surface which has a statistical roughness resulting from various grinding processes.