Proposed surface modeling for slip resistance of the shoe-floor interface

Slips and falls are the major causes of the pedestrian injuries in the industry and the general community throughout the world. With the awareness of these problems, the friction coefficients of the interface between floorings and footwear have been measured for the evaluation of slip resistant properties. During this measurement process, the surface texture has been shown to be substantially effective to the friction mechanism between shoe heels and floor surfaces under various types of walking environment. Roughness, either of the floor surface or shoe heels, provides the necessary drainage spaces. This roughness can be designed into the shoe heel but this is inadequate in some cases, especially a wear. Therefore, it is essential that the proper roughness for the floor surface coverings should be provided. The phenomena that observed at the interface between a sliding elastomer and a rigid contaminated floor surface are very diverse and combined mechanisms. Besides, the real surface geometry is quite complicate and the characteristics of both mating surfaces are continuously changing in the process of running-in so that a finite number of surface parameters can not provide a proper description of the complex and peculiar shoe - floor contact sliding mechanism. It is hypothesised that the interface topography changes are mainly occurred in the shoe heel surfaces, because the general property of the shoe is soft in the face of hardness compared with the floor materials This point can be idealized as sliding of a soft shoe heel over an array of wedge-shaped hard asperities of floor surface. Therefore, it is considered that a modelling for shoe - floor contact sliding mechanism is mainly depended upon the surface topography of the floor counterforce. With the model development, several surface parameters were measured and tested to choose the best describing surface parameters. As the result, the asperity peak density (APD) of the floor surface was developed as one of the best describing parameters to explain the ambiguous shoe - floor interface friction mechanism. It is concluded that the floor surface should be continuously monitored with the suitable surface parameters and kept the proper level of roughness to maintain the footwear slip resistance. This result can be applied to the initial stage of design for the floor coverings.