We report on the successful realization of a contactless, non-perturbing, displacement-measuring system for characterizing the surface roughness of polymer materials used in tribological applications. A single, time-dependent, scalar value, dubbed the collective micro-asperity deformation, is extracted from the normal-displacement measurements of normally loaded polymer samples. The displacement measurements with a sub-nanometer resolution are obtained with a homodyne quadrature laser interferometer. The measured collective micro-asperity deformation is critical for a determination of the real contact area and thus for the realistic contact conditions in tribological applications. The designed measuring system senses both the bulk creep as well as the micro-asperity creep occurring at the roughness peaks. The final results of our experimental measurements are three time-dependent values of the collective micro-asperity deformation for the three selected surface roughnesses. These values can be directly compared to theoretical deformation curves, which can be derived using existing real-contact-area models.
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