抄録
Electrical contact resistance between two metal surfaces in contact under a load is related to the real contact area and the number of contact points. The real contact area is usally much smaller than the apparent contact area, because the actual metal surface has many fine asperities on it. The measured value of electrical contact resistance does not agree well with the theoretical value obtained by neglecting asperities on the metal surfaces. The reason is that the metal sur-faces are not perfectly flat and fine asperities on them make the mutual contact. The contact between asperities is related to distribution of asperities, in other words, to the number of asperi-ties per unit area and the height difference of asperity-tips. Therefore, it is presumedd that the contact resistance depends on the surface roughness and the shape of contact metals.
The author has experimentally confirmed the distribution of the height of asperity-tips and dependence of the contact resistance upon the surface roughness and the shape of contact metals.
