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Research Article | Open Access

Understanding the friction laws of Amontons and Coulomb by evaluating the real contact area

Mitjan Kalin( )Petra Jan
Laboratory for Tribology and Interface Nanotechnology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana 1000, Slovenia
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Abstract

Friction is a complex phenomenon that depends on many parameters. Despite this, we still rely on and describe friction in the vast majority of cases with a single value, namely, the coefficient of friction (µ), as first proposed by Amontons in 1699. Later, Coulomb introduced a two-parameter description by separating the adhesive and load-dependent terms. However, experimental evidence that determines under what conditions either of the two historical models is more appropriate has not been investigated in detail. In particular, to take full advantage and achieve better accuracy with the two-parameter equation, the real contact area must be well characterized to determine the constant adhesive component sufficiently and accurately. In this study, we performed sliding experiments and measured friction, but at the same time, we also measured the real contact area with sub-micron lateral resolution, which allowed us to design a two-parameter (Coulomb-type) friction equation. We compared these results with the historical friction models of Amontons and Coulomb to better understand the actual differences between them and how this corresponds to the linearity between the friction force and the normal force, which is a key assumption in the more common and simpler Amontons relation. A strong scaling effect of roughness was observed, as well as the related nonlinearity between the normal load, friction, and real contact area. Under high loads and roughnesses, the one- or two-parameter friction descriptive models differed from experiments by only a few percent, and the variation among them was small in the same range. However, for very low roughnesses and loads (close to the nanoscale region), the two-parameter Coulomb model was required for any relevant friction prediction due to the strong adhesive contribution, while the one-parameter description was not appropriate.

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Friction
Article number: 9440986
Cite this article:
Kalin M, Jan P. Understanding the friction laws of Amontons and Coulomb by evaluating the real contact area. Friction, 2025, 13(1): 9440986. https://doi.org/10.26599/FRICT.2025.9440986

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Received: 03 July 2024
Revised: 06 August 2024
Accepted: 19 August 2024
Published: 09 December 2024
© The Author(s) 2025.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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