Keywords: contact mechanics, viscoelastic materials, ground modeling, sliding, elastomers, multi-scale.

A local analysis of nonlinear elastomers steadily sliding over rough surfaces at scales ranging from millimeters to micrometers is presently mostly restricted to materials in small strains governed by linear constitutive laws. Our goal herein is to extend this local approach in order to be able to handle large deformation and nonlinear viscoelastic constitutive laws. The basic constitutive model to be used for this purpose is fully incompressible and enters in the general class of parallel network models. It will be calibrated on available experimental data, using a minimal number of branches which is cost efficient compared to certain industrial models using dozen of branches. Moreover, it couples the different time scales, as might occur due to the evolution of the underlying microstructure, which cannot be done by the standard multi-branch models. We will then illustrate how this model can be used in large deformation first as a post treatment quantitatively evaluating the potential inaccuracies of the linear model, and second as the main constituent of a full nonlinear analysis of the problem.

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