Modeling the adhesive contact of rough soft media with an advanced asperity model

Adhesive interactions strongly characterize the contact mechanics of soft bodies as they lead to large elastic deformations and contact instabilities. In this paper, we extend the Interacting and Coalescing Hertzian Asperities (ICHA) model to the case of adhesive contact. Adhesion is modeled according to an improved version of the Johnson, Kendall & Roberts (JKR) theory, in which jump-in contact instabilities are conveniently considered as well as the lateral interaction of the asperities and the coalescence of merging contact spots. Results obtained on complex fractal geometries with several length scales are accurate as demonstrated by the comparison with fully numerical simulations and experimental investigations taken from the literature. Also, the model quite well captures the distributions of the contact stresses, gaps, and contact spots.