Modeling of Rough Surface and Contact Simulation

As a result of limitation of manufacturing processes, real surfaces always have some roughness and surface curvature. In many heat transfer applications, the perfectly smooth surfaces are necessary to transmit the heat. Due to the surface curvature of contacting bodies, the macro-contact area is formed, the area where micro-contacts are distributed randomly. The real contact occurs only over microscopic contacts. The heat flow must pass through the macro-contact and then micro-contacts to transfer from one body to another to form heat conductance. This phenomenon leads to a relatively high temperature drop across the interface. Thermal contact resistance (TCR) is a complex interdisciplinary problem, which includes geometrical, mechanical, and thermal analyses. In this paper, geometric modeling of asperities of rough surface 2 μm, 3.2 μm and 15μm surface roughness's is done in ANSYS and the number of asperities and areal contact area is found. The simulation is done with 1.8MPa pressure and with SS 304 as material for all above mentioned surface roughness's. The contacting bodies are kept at LN2 temperature and atmospheric temperature.