Hearing starts when sound-evoked mechanical vibrations of the hair-cell bundle activate mechanosensitive ion channels, giving birth to an electrical signal. As for any mechanical system, friction impedes movements of the hair bundle and thus constrains the sensitivity and frequency selectivity of auditory transduction. Friction is generally thought to result mainly from viscous drag by the surr...

Friction force microscopy measurements on the vacuum-cleaved (001) surfaces of KF, KCl and KBr have been carried out. All surfaces exhibit atomically flat terraces with monatomic steps aligned preferentially along low-index lattice directions. Stick-slip lateral forces with the lattice periodicity are observed on all surfaces. Tip-sample contact creates higher friction domains on the terraces o...

We present first elements of kinetic theory appropriate to the inhomogeneous phase of the HMF model. In particular, we investigate the case of strongly inhomogeneous distributions for T → 0 and exhibit curious behaviour of the force auto-correlation function and friction coefficient. The temporal correlation function of the force has an oscillatory behaviour which averages to zero over a period...

Tissue grasping is a crucial component of surgical procedures that involves simultaneously satisfying two competing criteria – maintaining grasp stability while avoiding damage due to excessive grip force. Automation of grasp force control thus requires a controller to apply grasping forces just sufficient to maintain grasp stability. This task is complicated by the serially connected dynamics ...

The friction force on a nanometer-sized tip sliding on a surface is related to the thermally activated hopping of the contact atoms on an effective atomic interaction potential. A general analytical expression relates the height of this potential and the hopping attempt frequency to measurements of the velocity dependence of the friction force performed with an atomic force microscope. While th...

This paper examines the effect of friction model on the simulation accuracy of a hydraulic cylinder by using three friction models: a steady-state friction model, the LuGre model, and the new modified LuGre model. Hydraulic cylinder’s behaviors were measured under sinusoidal input to the servo valve. Simulations were conducted under the same conditions as the experiments. The comparisons of sim...

Presented here is a novel technique for the in situ calibration and measurement of friction with the atomic force microscope that can be applied simultaneously with the normal force measurement. The method exploits the fact that the cantilever sits at an angle of about 10° to the horizontal, which causes the tip or probe to slide horizontally over the substrate as a normal force run is performe...

The friction between a single silica glass sphere and a flat silica glass surface has been investigated using lateral force microscopy. Two types of silica surface were investigated, one fully hydroxylated and the other partially dehydroxlated. These samples have markedly different wetting properties and are known as hydrophilic and hydrophobic silica, respectively. The lateral friction force a...

We have examined the fabric-to-metal surface and fabric-to-fabric frictional characteristics (in both warp and weft directions) of a series of fabrics containing 100% polyester, 100% viscose, and P/C & P/V blends with different blend proportions. It has been observed that the normal load and the frictional force follow a logarithmic relationship for all the fabrics. The nature of fabric frictio...

Sliding friction across a thin soft lubricant film typically occurs by stick slip, the lubricant fully solidifying at stick, yielding and flowing at slip. The static friction force per unit area preceding slip is known from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to decrease with increasing contact area. That makes the large-size fate of stick slip unclear and unknown; its possible vanishing is imp...