Suppression of friction by mechanical vibrations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how mechanical vibrations can suppress frictional forces in particle systems, providing numerical and theoretical insights into controlling friction through vibrational parameters.

Contribution

It offers a combined numerical and theoretical analysis of friction suppression via vibrations, including a phase diagram for optimal parameters.

Findings

Friction suppression occurs within specific frequency ranges.

The suppression depends on amplitude, load, inertia, and damping.

A phase diagram maps the conditions for friction reduction.

Abstract

Mechanical vibrations are known to affect frictional sliding and the associated stick-slip patterns causing sometimes a drastic reduction of the friction force. This issue is relevant for applications in nanotribology and to understand earthquake triggering by small dynamic perturbations . We study the dynamics of repulsive particles confined between a horizontally driven top plate and a vertically oscillating bottom plate. Our numerical results show a suppression of the high dissipative stick-slip regime in a well defined range of frequencies that depends on the vibrating amplitude, the normal applied load, the system inertia and the damping constant. We propose a theoretical explanation of the numerical results and derive a phase diagram indicating the region of parameter space where friction is suppressed. Our results allow to define better strategies for the mechanical control of friction.