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Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 69, No. 3, March 1998 Maheshappa et al. 1535
III. EXPERIMENTATION
on the samples. It measures the load up to 1 ton with an A pair of brass pellets having a diameter 16 and thick-
accuracy of 60.1%. ness of 10 mm are made with the contacting flat surfaces,
An 8 21 digit multimeter ~DMM! 2002 ~Keithley Instru- polished with standard grit 800 emery paper. The opposite
ments Ltd.! which can measure resistance with a resolution surfaces are machined to have 2 and 4 mm diam buttons. The
of 0.1 mV is used to measure the contact resistance. This Teflon insulated copper leads are soldered on these buttons
multimeter is configured for four wire measurement which and are taken out for electrical connectivity through the slots
minimizes the lead resistance including the resistance of sol- provided on the sample holders. These samples are placed
dered joints. The meter has a built-in current source which one on top of the other to form a ‘‘contact.’’ This contact is
can provide a constant current of 7.1873 mA, irrespective of placed between two sample holders, which are separated by
the load. There is a provision in the instrument for compen- two mica washers as shown in Fig. 1 to form the test column.
sating for the effect of thermal emfs that are likely to occur The column is mounted inside the contact conductance cell.
in the measurement due to temperature variations. The DMM The cell is evacuated to a pressure of 1025 mbar. The DMM
is interfaced to a personal computer using a general purpose is powered 4 h before collection of the experimental data.
interface bus ~GPIB! interface card to log the data at required The test leads are soldered to Teflon insulated, multistrand
intervals of time. The collected data are the average of the wires 0.1 mm in diameter. The other ends are soldered to the
integral values, sampled over a known duration of time. Soft- samples. The hydraulic pump is started. The solenoid valve
ware has been developed to log and postprocess the data. that acts as a pressure switch is dethrottled. The load indica-
tor is energized and adjusted to read zero with no load. The
solenoid valve is throttled to increase the pressure on the
samples. The applied force is read on the load indicator and
the resistance value is read on the multimeter. The procedure
is repeated for incremental lods in steps of 1 kg up to 200 kg.
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1536 Rev. Sci. Instrum., Vol. 69, No. 3, March 1998 Maheshappa et al.
0.02H. 5 Yield stress depends on the strain hardening. For where, r c is the radius of the area of apparent contact,4 r is
continuously loaded contacts, the strain-hardening is greater. the resistivity (8.531028 V m!, and E is Young’s modulus
The yield stress is much smaller than the contact hardness (1031010 N/m2). For the forces above 80 N, a deviation
(H5100) of the material; it can be assumed to be 0.1H. 5 from the above law is observed when the material is in the
The actual contact area is assumed to be 20% of the apparent plastic region.
contact area. With these assumptions, the contact force is
calculated to be 80 N. At this point, brass yields into the
plastic region from the elastic region. 0.232 N21/3 shown in
Fig. 3 corresponds to the value of ~80 N!21/3. there are seven
values of resistance measured for the forces below 80 N. A 1
T. Tamai, IEEE Trans. Compon. Hybrids Manuf. Technol. 9, 41 ~1986!.
2
straight line fit through these values has a slope of 739.6 G. V. Narasimha Rao, V. S. Sastry, T. S. Radhakrishnan, and V.
mV/N21/3. This is in good agreement with the constant Kc 3
Seshagiri, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 67, 333 ~1996!.
which is calculated to be 744 mV/N21/3: M. Braunovic, IEEE Trans. Compon. Hybrids Manuf. Technol. 8, 313
~1986!.
r
4
J. I. Queflelec, N. Bennjemaa, D. Travers, and G. Pethieu, IEEE Trans.
K c5 21/3 , Compon. Hybrids Manuf. Technol. 14, 90 ~1991!.
1.1p r 1/3
c E 5
R. Holm, Electric Contacts, 4th ed. ~Springer, New York, 1981!.
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