Abstract
We consider the Robin Hood model of dry friction to study entropy transfer during sliding. For the polished surface (steady state) we study the probability distribution of slips and find an exponential behavior for all the physically relevant asperity interaction-distance thresholds. In addition, we characterize the time evolution of the sample by its spatial fractal dimension and by its entropy content. Starting from an unpolished surface, the entropy decreases during the Robin Hood process, until it reaches a plateau; thereafter the system fluctuates above the critical height. This validates the notion that friction increases information in the neighborhood of the contacting surface at the expense of losing information in remote regions. We explain the practical relevance of these results for engineering surface processing such as honing.
Highlights
The idea of using entropy as a way to characterize surface healing during friction due to self organization was already put forward by Nosonovsky and Bhushan [1]
In this paper we studied numerically the approach to steady state in dry friction
Starting from a randomly generated surface profile corresponding to random local separations between the rubbing surfaces, we introduced dynamics based on the Robin Hood algorithm
Summary
The idea of using entropy as a way to characterize surface healing during friction due to self organization was already put forward by Nosonovsky and Bhushan [1]. Honing is different in that the height distribution is significantly asymmetric with respect to the mean This is of interest to us since the Robin Hood model studied by us in the context of dry friction [3] generates surfaces with height distribution belonging to the honing class. As expected in this process of self-organization, many power laws were found, such as in the power spectra and avalanche sizes [4].
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