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A remarkably simple model goes a long way to explaining stick-slip motion.
WE ARE ALL FAMILIAR WITH STICK-SUP BEHAVIOR, both in our professional and our everyday lives. The sound of the violin, the squeak of the horror-movie door and the shaking during an earthquake are all manifestations of this ubiquitous phenomenon. Many studies have dealt with stick-slip, and not a few attempts have been made to model it, generally focusing on the dynamics of the slider system and the slider-track interface.
In a recent issue of Tribology Letters, Michael Varenberg and Yuri Kligerman of the Technion-IIT in Israel published an alternative, extremely simple massless (non-inertial), quasi-static (non-viscous) approach to the problem.
In systems in which the contacting area is split among many asperities, such as under the many split protuberances in the feet of certain insects and amphibians, stick-slip has been observed to be far less likely to occur than in systems where there are few...