Abstract
Humans rely on their fingers to sense and interact with external environment. Understanding the tribological behavior between finger skin and object surface is crucial for various fields, including tactile perception, product appearance design, and electronic skin research. Quantitatively describing finger frictional behavior is always challenging, given the complex structure of the finger. In this study, the texture and sliding direction dependence of finger skin friction was quantified based on explicit mathematic models. The proposed double-layer model of finger skin effectively described the nonlinear elastic response of skin and predicted the scaling-law of effective elastic modulus with contact radius. Additionally, the skin friction model on textured surface considering adhesion and deformation factors was established. It revealed that adhesive term dominated finger friction behavior in daily life, and suggested that object texture size mainly influenced friction-induced vibrations rather than the average friction force. Combined with digital image correlation (DIC) technique, the effect of sliding direction on finger friction was analyzed. It was found that the anisotropy in finger friction was governed by the finger’s ratchet pawl structure, which also contributes to enhanced stick-slip vibrations in the distal sliding direction. The proposed friction models can offer valuable insights into the underlying mechanism of skin friction under various operating conditions, and can provide quantitative guidance for effectively encoding friction into haptics.
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The authors are grateful for the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52175176) and Joint Funds of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2141248).
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The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. The author Prof. Yu TIAN is the Editorial Board Member of this journal, and the author Prof. Yonggang MENG is the Associate Editor of this journal.
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Yuanzhe LI. He received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong Univiersity in 2017 and Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering at Tsinghua University in 2022. His research interests include tactile friction, surface forces, and nanothermal engineering.
Xue ZHOU. She received her B.S. and Ph.D degrees in mechanical engineering from Southwest Jiaotong University in 2016 and 2022, received general engineering diploma from École Centrale de Lyon, France, in 2016. She is now following a postdoctoral period at the State Key Laboratory of Tribology in Advanced Equipment (SKLT), Tsinghua University. Her research interests include biotribology, bionic tribology, and tactile friction.
Pengpeng BAI. He received his Ph.D. degree at China University of Petroleum (Beijing), in 2017, majoring in materials science and engineering. Following a postdoctoral period at SKLT in Tsinghua University, he is now working as an associate researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University. He has published over 40 papers. His research interests include the interface science and technology, high temperature liquid lubricant, and corrosion protection mechanism of metals, etc.
Zhonghuan XIANG. He received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Tsinghua University. Now he is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, China. His current research focuses on tactile friction.
Yonggang MENG. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Kumamoto University, Japan, in 1986 and 1989, respectively. He joined the SKLT at Tsinghua University in 1990. His current position is a professor, and his research areas cover the tribology of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and hard disk drives, active control of friction and interfacial phenomena, and nanomanufacturing.
Liran MA. She received her B.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 2005, and received her Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in 2010. Following a postdoctoral period at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, she is now working as an associate professor in the SKLT, Tsinghua University. Her interests in tribology have ranged from aqueous lubrication and hydration lubrication to the liquid/solid interface properties. She has published over 50 papers. Her honors include the Hinwin Doctoral Dissertation Award (2011), the Maple Leaf Award for Outstanding Young Tribologists (2015), and Chang Jiang Scholars Program-Young Professor Award (2015).
Yu TIAN. He is a professor and director of the SKLT at Tsinghua University of China. He gained his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering at Tsinghua University in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Subsequently, he joined the SKLT. He was a postdoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara with professor Jacob ISRAELACHVILI from 2005 to 2007. His research interest is the science and technology at the interface of physics, materials, engineering, and biology to understand the physical laws of adhesion, friction, and rheology to implement technological inventions to benefit the society. He has received the Youth Science and Technology Award of China (2016), the Yangtze River Scholars Distinguished Professor (2015–2019), the National Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scientists of China (2014), the Wen Shizhu-Maple Award-Young Scholar Award (2012), the Young Scholar Achievement Award of the Society of Mechanical Engineering of China (2011), Outstanding Young Scholar Award of the Chinese Tribology Institute (2009), and the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China (2004).
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Li, Y., Zhou, X., Bai, P. et al. Experiment and modelling of texture and sliding direction dependence on finger friction behavior. Friction 12, 1955–1968 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-023-0816-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-023-0816-9