Seminar IOC Friction, Adhesion and Contact Mechanics of Deformable Interfaces. Prof. Nicola Menga, PhD. Thursday, 28/05/2026, 15:00h

Date: Thursday, 28/05/2026, 15:00h
Room: IOC seminar (11th-floor ETSEIB building)

Title: Friction, Adhesion and Contact Mechanics of Deformable Interfaces

Abstract: Tribology is the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion, under dry or lubricated conditions. It is a highly interdisciplinary field, involving mechanics, physics, chemistry, materials science and surface engineering. In many engineering applications, understanding and controlling interfacial phenomena such as friction, adhesion, wear, leakage and energy dissipation is crucial for the design of reliable and efficient mechanical systems, including seals, coatings, tyres, soft polymers, biomedical devices, adhesives and micro-/nano-mechanical systems. Contact mechanics provides the theoretical and numerical tools to describe the interactions occurring between deformable solids, both in static and sliding conditions. However, real interfaces are rarely ideal: they are rough, often adhesive, sometimes lubricated, and may involve viscoelastic materials, thin layers, soft substrates or complex surface interactions. Under these conditions, classical half-space assumptions and elementary friction laws may fail to capture the actual interfacial response. This seminar will provide a broad introduction to selected problems in modern contact mechanics and tribology, discussing how surface interactions, adhesion, viscoelastic dissipation and finite-size effects influence contact area, pressure distribution, friction, leakage and detachment processes. Examples from sliding contacts and peeling mechanics will be used to show how geometry, material rheology and interfacial interactions can be exploited to understand and design advanced tribological systems, such as soft adhesive interfaces, polymeric coatings, seals and biomedical devices.


Nicola’s Short Biography: Nicola obtained his Master cum laude in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University of Bari (Italy) in 2011. After spending about one year in the Tribology group at Imperial College London, in 2015 he obtained his PhD in Tribology, funded by GE Avio, with a thesis on the effect of adhesion and friction viscoelastic contacts. After three years as post-doc at Polytechnic University of Bari and Visiting Academic at Imperial College working on contact mechanics, he was granted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2019-2021) at Imperial College London (UK) to develop frictional contact models for thin soft materials. In 2020, he gained a Senior Lectureship at the Polytechnic University of Bari. In 2023, he became Associate Professor of Applied Mechanics in the same university, where he is currently member of the Tribology Lab. He acted as (co-)PI in several research project, such as TRIBOSCORE (TRibological modellIng for sustainaBle design Of induStrial friCtiOnal inteRfacEs), and ELFIN (ELectroactive gripper For mIcro-object maNipulation). His research interests mainly focus on tribology and interfacial phenomena, mostly aiming at controlling friction and adhesion in real systems (eg., tires, micro/macro grippers, tapes, etc.). Key topics include the modelling of elastic/viscoelastic frictional contacts of real interfaces in sliding/static condition in the presence of adhesion, also accounting for material confinement (e.g., in-plane and out-of-plane coupling); the analysis of the interplay between adhesion and viscoelasticity in sliding and oscillating unsteady contacts, eventually leading to effective adhesion enhancement/reduction; the study of peeling of (visco)elastic tapes adhering to deformable substrate; the surface wetting behavior, such as roughness induced super-hydrophobicity on fluorinated polymers. He is also interested in friction-related nonlinear dynamics of multi-DoF systems, such as seismic isolators with viscoelastic nonlinear damping (Rubber Layer Roller Bearings), and macro-/micro-structured interfaces for sliding friction control (dry ski slopes).