Abstract
The electrical contact is an important phenomenon that should be given into consideration to achieve better performance and long term reliability for the design of devices. Based upon this importance, the electrical contact interface has been visualized as a ‘‘3D Contact Map’’ and used in order to investigate the contact asperities. The contact asperities describe the structures above and below the contact spots (the contact spots define the 3D contact map) to the two conductors which make the contact system. The contact asperities require the discretization of the 3D microstructures of the contact system into voxels. A contact analysis approach has been developed and introduced in this paper which shows the way to the 3D visualization of the contact asperities of a given contact system. For the discretization of 3D microstructure of contact system into voxels, X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) method is used in order to collect the data of a 250 V, 16 A rated AC single pole rocker switch which is used as a contact system for investigation.
Highlights
The nature of real flat surfaces of solid bodies which seem to be flat at first sight in macroscale in reality are rough at the microscale and further rough in nanoscale.[1,2,3,4] When the surfaces of the two bodies are brought together their roughness influence mechanical contact which occurs only in a specific number of areas on the apparent area of contact
The 1-bit 2D cross-section slice images of the contact system are analyzed with Contact Analysis Techniques (CAT*) which are developed and implemented with a suite of tools developed in MATLAB and Image Processing Toolbox
The 3D contact map is visualized using the 2D cross-section slice images which are processed and implemented using CAT* with a suite of tools developed in MATLAB as described in previous work.[11]
Summary
The nature of real flat surfaces of solid bodies which seem to be flat at first sight in macroscale in reality are rough at the microscale and further rough in nanoscale.[1,2,3,4] When the surfaces of the two bodies are brought together their roughness influence mechanical contact which occurs only in a specific number of areas on the apparent area of contact. The peaks of the roughness of surfaces which are in mechanical contact are called contact spots and their structures above and below the two bodies are called contact asperities. The contact spots are found to be very important by many researchers and visualized using different methods. The visualization methods can be classified into destructive and non-destructive.[5] Destructive methods such as Thermo-Graphic (TG)[6] and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)[7] can be applied if one part of the surface is replaced to enable the viewing of the surface, or if both bodies of the original contact are inspected, are necessary to be dismantled after testing for analysis. In addition to MRI and X-ray CT, there are different numerical approaches to show the contact spots.[15,16]
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