Research on the Mechanism of Transition from Static to Dynamic Microscale Friction Behavior
Microscale contact and friction behavior are widely present in various important industrial devices and systems.As electromechanical systems become more integrated and miniaturized,the impact of friction on devices becomes increasingly important.At the microscale,friction behavior exhibits a strong dependence on interfacial viscosity and contact size.By developing a series of modifiable potential functions to quantitatively regulate interfacial properties,friction on atomically smooth interfaces with dif-ferent properties is fully simulated using molecular dynamics methods.The study first examined the influ-ence of various interfacial potential energies on the static friction coefficient,revealing a nonlinear relation-ship between the static friction coefficient and interfacial potential energy intensity.Furthermore,it was found that this nonlinearity is attributed to the competition between interfacial viscosity and contact stiff-ness.Additionally,the study investigated the influence of contact size on static friction coefficient.The simulation results showed that as the tangential contact length of the interface increases,the peak static friction force first increases and then stabilizes.By analyzing the contact layer cloud maps obtained through post-processing,interfacial friction is observed as a"nucleation-propagation"process,influenced by differ-ent contact sizes which affect the dynamic process and lead to changes in the peak static friction force.This study provides new insights into the effects of interfacial potential energy and contact size on microscale friction through molecular dynamics simulations,it is feasible to regulate friction by changing interfacial potential energy,but attention should be paid to the nonlinear changes in the friction coefficient.Besides,solely increasing the contact size cannot infinitely increase the peak static friction force.