Contact and frictional behavior of rough surfaces using molecular dynamics combined with fractal theory

The microcontact behavior of a copper asperity on a diamond plate was carried out using a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation with the parallel algorithms atom decomposition method. The results show that the dynamic frictional force had an oscillated behavior when the flat diamond plane slipped through the copper asperity. The contact load, contact area, dynamic frictional force, and dynamic frictional coefficient increased as the contact interference increased at a constant loading velocity. The dynamic frictional force and dynamic frictional coefficient increased as the sliding velocity increased. Furthermore, the microcontact behavior can be evaluated between a rigid smooth flat plane and a rigid smooth hemisphere to a deformable rough flat plane by combining the deformed behavior of the asperity obtained from MD results and the fractal and statistic parameters.