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Contact kinematics of a step-compressed viscoelastic solid

A recently developed approach to study microscopic-scale viscoelastic solid (VS) interfacial contact is applied to quantify the natural law governing the growth of the contact area for a nominally flat VS/solid substrate pair subjected to a uniaxial step compression. A VS is assumed to make contact via some random process; its progress is tracked by treating the VS/substrate interface as a set of many small elements and partitioning them into subsets according to their contact status. A description for the said natural law, in the form of a map relating contact growth with the compressive strain, dwell time, relaxation time and other material properties of the VS/substrate pair, is obtained through non-deterministic considerations that require neither imposing linearity on viscoelastic behaviour nor input of surface topographic data. The proposed description is thus valid for the contact of any solid with a VS, linear or not. Its features, implications and relevance to VS parts design are discussed.