Mechanics of adhesive contacts: Experiment and theory

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in AIP Conference Proceedings 2167, 020201 (2019) and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5132068.Adhesive contacts between steel indenters and a layer of soft transparent rubber have been studied experimentally and numerically. Experiments were carried out using a setup allowing for slow exact positioning of the indenter in both normal and tangential direction and observing the contact area with a camera placed under the rubber layer. Indentation of flat-ended cylindrical punches showed that Boundary Element simulations very accurately describe experimental results. Changing velocity allowed determining the importance of viscoelastic effects on the adhesive contact