Contact Mechanics of Laser-Textured Surfaces

We study numerically the contact mechanics of a flat and a curved solid. Each solid bears laser-induced, periodic grooves on its rubbing surface. Our surface topographies produce a similar load and resolution dependence of the true contact area as nominally flat, but randomly rough, self-affine surfaces. However, the contact area of laser-textured solids depends on their relative orientation. The estimated true contact areas correlate with kinetic friction measurements