How Does Rubber Slide?

Abstract

Abstract Visual observations of contact areas between soft rubber sliders and hard tracks, and between hard sliders and soft rubber tracks, show that relative motion between the two frictional members is often only due to “waves of detachment” crossing the contact area at high speed from front to rear. Adhesion appears to be complete between these waves which are moving folds in the rubber surface, almost certainly produced by buckling. Buckling is attributed to tangential compressive stresses, predicted by a simple theory and qualitatively confirmed by experiment. The driving force for the waves of detachment is a tangential stress gradient, also theoretically predicted.