Haptic assessment of products is vital to the customer’s overall perception. For this reason, a number of firms direct considerable resources towards optimizing the haptic experience with their products. Objective knowledge of correlations between surface properties and tactile assessment is limited, and efforts at haptic improvement are iterative, expensive, and often do not produce general knowledge that can be translated for use in other products. The haptic experience is a complex interplay of a number of surface and material parameters, all of which have not yet been identified. However, it is hypothesized that friction coefficient plays a particularly important role. Because surface texturing is a common method to impart favorable haptics, it was decided to investigate the relationship between texture geometry and friction coefficient in polypropylene. This work is a continuation of a study previously introduced. The coefficient of friction (COF) of textured panels of parallel raised ridges was evaluated and it was found that a classic adhesion model of friction was a very strong predictor of texture COF. However, there was also evidence that secondary effects due to viscoelastic deformation of the soft material were comparable in magnitude to adhesive friction.
展开▼
