The Effect of Frictional Metasurfaces on Energy Dissipation in Mechanical Metamaterials

In recent years continued advancements in high‐precision fabrication technologies have led to new possibilities for tuning the tribological properties of materials through surface patterns. Applied to frictional metamaterials, this opens opportunities to enhance energy dissipation performance through the design of the contact surface topography. This study investigates the influence of various metamaterial contact surface patterns, which we refer to as frictional metasurfaces, on energy dissipation in sliding friction through both experiments and FE simulations. Several surface pattern geometries were tested and compared to the baseline represented by a flat smooth surface. The length scale of these patterns was constrained by manufacturing considerations. In addition, the use of different materials for the metasurface and the main body of the metamaterial was examined. These tests and simulations show that non‐smooth surfaces can indeed increase friction and energy dissipation, but the magnitude of their contribution emerges from interactions between the geometry and the elasticity of the metamaterial structure that supports the contact surface, as manifested through the contact pressure distribution, and particularly the scale of pressure and friction concentrations and their evolution during the load cycle.