Non Amontons-Coulomb local friction law of randomly rough contact interfaces with rubber

International audienceWe report on measurements of the local friction law at a multi-contact interface formed between a smooth rubber and statistically rough glass lenses, under steady-state friction. Using contact imaging, surface displacements are measured, and inverted to extract both distributions of frictional shear stress and contact pressure with a spatial resolution of about 10 mu m. For a glass surface whose topography is self-affine with a Gaussian height asperity distribution, the local frictional shear stress is found to vary sub-linearly with the local contact pressure over the whole investigated pressure range. Such sub-linear behavior is also evidenced for a surface with a non-Gaussian height asperity distribution, demonstrating that, for such multi-contact interfaces, Amontons-Coulomb's friction law does not prevail at the local scal