Physical essence of the multibody contact-sliding at atomic scale

School of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P. R. China

^a e-mail: hanxuesongphd@126.com

Received: 18 October 2013
Revised: 22 November 2013
Accepted: 25 November 2013
Published online: 6 January 2014

Abstract

Investigation the multibody contact-sliding occurred at atomic discrete contact spot will play an important role in determine the origin of tribology behavior and evaluates the micro-mechanical property of nanomaterials and thus optimizing the design of surface texture. This paper carries out large scale parallel molecular dynamics simulation on contact-sliding at atomic scale to uncover the special physical essence. The research shows that some kind of force field exists between nanodot pair and the interaction can be expressed by the linear combination of exponential function while the effective interaction distance limited in 1 angstrom for nanodot with several tens of nanometer diameter. The variation tendency about the interaction force between nanodot array is almost the same between nanodot pairs and thus the interaction between two nanodot array can be characterized by parallel mechanical spring. Multibody effect which dominates the interaction between atoms or molecules will gradually diminish with the increasing of length scales.