Minimal adhesion surface area in tangentially loaded digital contacts.

The stick-to-slip transition of a fingertip in contact with a planar surface does not occur instantaneously. As the tangential load increases, portions of the skin adhere while others slip, giving rise to an evolution of the contact state, termed partial slip. We develop a quasi-static model that predicts that if the coefficient of kinetic friction is larger than the coefficient of static friction, then the stuck surface area diminishes as the tangential load increases until reaching a 'minimal adhesion surface area' where it vanishes abruptly. This phenomenon was observed in recently measured finger-slip image data (André et al., 2011) that were processed by an optic flow detection algorithm. We examined the results of 10 trials. Four of them exhibited the minimal adhesion surface area phenomenon, four of them did not, and two were inconclusive.