Effects of Vibration on a Coulomb Friction System

Deformable systems that rely on dry friction for their proper functioning are widely found in many engineering applications such as bolted components, railway ballast. The design of these systems is usually considered from static point of view and employing Coulomb model of friction. This paper studies the effects of dynamic loading on the behavior of a two dimensional system by finite element modeling and by experiments. It was found that the functioning of the system can break down depending on the value of the set of amplitude of vibration, frequency and preload. There are domains in the space of these characteristics that the contact surfaces would be momentarily separated resulting in accumulative sliding, leading to failure in the system’s functioning.