The Electrical Contact feature node has correlations to evaluate the joint conductance at two contacting surfaces.
The current densities at the upside and downside boundaries depend on the potential difference according to the relations:
Here, Hc is the microhardness of the softer material,
p is the contact pressure, and
σcontact is the harmonic mean of the contacting surface conductivities:
The relative pressure p ⁄Hc can be evaluated by specifying
Hc directly or using the following relation (4.16.1 in
Ref. 1) for the relative pressure using
c1 and
c2, the Vickers correlation coefficient and size index:
The coefficients c1 and
c2 are the Vickers correlation coefficient and size index, respectively, and
σ0 is equal to 1 µm. For materials with Brinell hardness between 1.30 and 7.60 GPa,
c1 and
c2 are given by the correlation below (4.16.1 in
Ref. 1):
Here, Econtact is an effective Young’s modulus for the contact interface, satisfying (4.16.3 in
Ref. 1):
where Eu and
Ed are the Young’s moduli of the two contacting surfaces and
νu and
νd are the Poisson’s ratios.