Nanoadhesion between rough surfaces.

ABSTRACT

A model is developed to describe the adhesion between deformable fractal surfaces over the mesoscopic realm that covers the familiar range of interest in nanotechnology from atomic dimensions to microns. This model helps us gain a quantitative understanding of the variation of adhesion with surface energy, with microstructure of rough surfaces, and with bulk deformability. The present analysis goes beyond the Gaussian distribution of asperity heights by investigating the influence of the microstructure of self-affine fractal surfaces. Our calculation reveals that orders of magnitude increase in adhesion are possible as the roughness exponent decreases.