Raphael Bilz, Kristin M. de Payrebrune

• Technical applications often include tribological systems in which friction and wear occur. Hard particles, such as sand, are often present in the contact between the surfaces of two bodies in contact and affect both the system dynamics and the resulting surface topography of the contacting bodies. Real tribological systems can contain a very high number of particles. Hence, for performance reasons of numerical studies, the explicit representation of each particle in a simulation is often not practical. The approach presented here is based on a model simplification by grouping several particles to form statistical sample particles (SSPs). SSPs can only move as a whole, and thereby simplify the motions of the individual particles, but the contact stiffness and orientation dependence of the force are still determined by the set of individual particles that are part of the statistical sample. Using sample size 1, each individual particle is represented without simplification, while using a sample size larger than one, the total number of particles in the system reduces to a minimum of one SSP representing all particles in the system. This approach provides a very efficient way to specify the model complexity and desired level of detail for the particle representation within a model of a tribological system.