Contact area and thermal conductance estimation based on the actual surface roughness measurement

Abstract

Thermal contact conductance (TCC) plays a vital role during any thermo-mechanical based analysis of the contacting surfaces. Inherently, it depends upon the actual contact-area at the interfaces, which is quite complex to estimate. This work aims to perform the micro-contact based structural, and thermal analysis of stochastically re-created rough surfaces, while using actual surface profile measurement, and proposes an experimentally validated FEM based approach for real contact area and TCC estimation. Different surface topography parameters estimation methods are compared, and a semi-deterministic based approach is evolved for the construction of surface topographies from actual roughness measurements. The asperities interactions and large deformation effects are incorporated during analysis. Close agreement between numerical and experimental TCC values shows the efficacy of the present approach.