Multi-scale approach for frictional contact of elastomers on rough rigid surfaces

Frictional phenomena can be observed in almost every engineering problem and application. An interesting application is related to the frictional behaviour of elastomers which often undergo finite deformations due to loading and material. In contrast to many surface combinations, where the frictional behaviour depends mostly on the nature of the contact surfaces, rubber friction results for the most part from internal energy dissipation. Therefore, rubber friction can be considered as a process inside the bulk of the material, which implies a large dependency on the used material characteristics but of course also on the surface characteristic. Both lead to energy dissipation in the bulk. In order to describe these phenomena which actually occur at different length scales, a multi-scale approach is introduced which applies the Finite Element Method as the numerical simulation tool.