Glass Mousepads vs Cordura vs Cloth: Dynamic and Static Friction Physics: Fundamental Mechanics and Deep Mathematical Modeling

[Henry Young]

I’ve been running controlled A/B tests on my control vs speed setups, but I keep hitting a wall in quantifying the actual friction coefficients. For anyone who’s dug into the math: how do you model the transition from static to kinetic friction on a woven textile surface like a cloth pad versus a homogeneous glass surface? Cloth clearly has anisotropic micro-texture, so the friction coefficient seems direction-dependent, but I’m struggling to find peer-reviewed data separating the static threshold from steady-state kinetic values. Does anyone have measured μs/μk ratios for pads in the control-to-speed continuum, or are we mostly working off anecdotal velocity-decay curves?

Second question touches on skate materials—PTFE, ultra-pure PTFE, and Sapphire. Given sapphire’s hardness (~9 on Mohs), shouldn’t the real contact area be dramatically smaller, lowering adhesion-based friction? Yet my tracking feels more “connected” on sapphire despite higher roll resistance. Is this hysteresis loss in the skate, or am I misreading the static grip? And finally, how badly does ambient humidity (>60%) degrade the kinetic consistency on glass versus sealed Cordura? Any of you instrument this with force sensors or just trust your raw input logs?

Main Rig:

"– i7-14700K cooled by DeepCool LT720"

"– RX 7800 XT"

"– 2TB Samsung 990 Pro"

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