How does roughness kill adhesion?

It is well-known that adhesion is strongly influenced by surface roughness. Nevertheless, the literature currently contains an ongoing debate regarding which roughness scales are primarily responsible for adhesion loss. In this study, we aim to contribute to this debate by conducting numerical simulations on self-affine fractal profiles with varying fractal dimensions. Our results reveal that the long-wavelength portion of the roughness spectrum plays a crucial role in killing adhesion when considering profiles with Hurst exponent H > 0.5. Conversely, for profiles with H < 0.5 , results show a different trend, indicating that adhesive stickiness is also influenced by short wavelength roughness. These findings are corroborated by our recent experimental observations. In such case, adhesive hysteresis and pull-off force exhibit a continuous decrease with increasing roughness scales. However, for H > 0.5 , the pull-off force converges towards a finite value as the magnification increases.