We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Anisotropic frictional properties of snake skin

Formal Metadata

Title
Anisotropic frictional properties of snake skin
Title of Series
Number of Parts
163
Author
License
CC Attribution - NoDerivatives 4.0 International:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Skin surface on the ventral surface of snakes is optimized for legless locomotion in the course of evolution. This frictional system was investigated using microtribological technique to gain a deepened insight in the specialized surface modifications of the snake skin. In our studies, we have shown that the frictional properties of snake skin are highly optimized to generate frictional anisotropy and to reduce the occurrence of stick-slip motion during sliding. Despite this a strong influence of the effective elastic modulus of underlying layers on the frictional properties in general and the anisotropic frictional properties in particular was shown. We assumed, that snakes are able to alter frictional properties of their ventral body surface by the variation of body stiffness and thereby their effective elastic modulus. These results show that the snake skin is a very attractive biological model for optimizing technical surfaces under tribological stress.
Keywords