The role of adhesion in the impact of elastic spheres

Many experiments have shown that when small particles impact a fixed surface, the coefficient of restitution can be influenced by adhesion forces. At low enough velocities the particles may be 'captured', so that no rebound occurs, and several theories exist in the literature which attempt to combine the effects of adhesion with inelastic deformation of the solids. In this paper we make use of the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts-Sperling (J-K-R-S) theory of adhesive elastic contact to examine interaction between adhesion and inelastic deformation in the impact of predominantly elastic solids.