On friction measurements and certification of slip‐preventing materials for road freight usages.

Slip‐preventing materials are often used as tertiary packaging to improve cargo securement and simplify truck loading. There are many national and international standards on their safe usage based on the extra friction they can provide. However, it is challenging to quantify the coefficient of friction (CoF) of slip‐preventing materials. This paper presents CoFs of three slip‐preventing materials and one baseline condition measured on different surfaces and contact pressures. These measurements show interesting phenomena that affect the result variability. For instance, 60% of the pairs of surfaces tested were affected by the contact pressure. Hence, the load of the freight seems to affect performance of the slip‐preventing materials. This interaction happened in different ways such as changes in the friction mode (constant slip and stick slip at difference frequencies and magnitudes). The typical CoF values available in standards as well as standardized measurement methods do not consider very well these effects nor how to deal with high variability of CoF measurements. This can lead to either over or under CoF estimations. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a statistical method to quantify slip‐preventing material CoFs based on variability and confidence intervals of the measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]