What is friction?Akshat Mahajan
:
THE MOST COMMON ORIGIN OF FRICTION
take down the mound , the summit , and the valley . These are calledasperities , or material deformations . They occur on harsh surfaces , and even flat surface might have small irregularities on them .
Now imagine examine torubthem against each other . Feel , for a moment , in your intellect ’s eye the opposition you are potential to come across as they grind against each other .
That comminute is the most common origin for friction , bothstatic(when your object is still and you ’re trying to get it to move ) andkinetic(when your object is already moving , and you need to keep it travel ) .
It is why the rubbing that wheels encounter while rolling ( calledrolling detrition ) is much lower than other types of friction , and why tyre have bass groove in them . It is also why friction tends todecreasethe plane and more uniform your surface amaze .
FRICTION FOR FLAT SURFACES
But friction canstillexist for perfectly plane surfaces , where sharpness of the shape above are no longer present .
utterly flat Earth’s surface stick to each other — in other words , they attempt to stick to each other . This is calledadhesion , and can be because of any number of reasons :
These military unit are typically weak enough that they are easily break once you come up the physical object — but not so weak that subdue the attraction by drag in the objective does n’t pose a problem .
FINALLY, A DEFINITION
Friction , then , is not so much aforceas it is the sum of very tiny force and irregularity along the boundary of surfaces .
It ispossibleto model it as a true force — and indeed , most high schoolhouse text do just that — but it is important to pick out that that is just a convenient abstraction . To put it another way : Friction is to forces what Santa Claus is to a jolly homo in a juicy case — window dressing on top of a very complex reality .
This post earlier appear on Quora . flick here to consider .
