Mechanism of rubber abrasion. Part I: Abrasion pattern formation in natural rubber vulcanizate

Abstract The driving force to generate the periodic surface patterns, and thus rubber abrasion consists of two kinds of periodic motions, stick-slip oscillation and the microvibration generated during frictional slidings of rubber. The stick-slip oscillation is the driving force to propagate cracks, then abrasion patterns and the microvibration with the natural frequency of the rubber induced in the slip phase of the stick-slip oscillation is another driving force for the initiation of the cracks. Although initial cracks originate in the slip region of the rubber surface, the propagation of the cracks is strongly excited in the stick region. Accordingly, the initial size of the abrasion pattern, pattern spacing, equals the distance determined by the natural period of the rubber and the mean sliding velocity while the constant pattern spacing after the critical number of frictional slidings agrees with the distance given by the period of the stick-slip oscillation and the mean sliding velocity. Consequently, during rubber abrasion, two driving forces produce bimodal size distribution of abraded particles, small particles of the order of ten micrometres by microvibrations and large ones of the order of a few hundred micrometres by the stick-slip motions.