Contact interaction described by short range surface forces

The contact interaction between two bodies has been modeled by a field of short range forces described at a macroscopic scale by exponential laws. This relatively simple description allowed us to produce a nice tutorial in contact mechanics by considering an incompressible Mooney-Rivlin affine body undergoing short-range interactions with a flat, rigid surface --interactions meant to model impact, damping, friction, and adhesion. Numerical integration of a handful of ODE's provides vivid simulations of the motion of such an affine body--stiff or soft, heavy or light--that bounces, rocks, rolls, slides or gets stuck on a flat floor or a vertical wall. Though the macroscopic scale model can exhibit a realistic behaviour, information from a microscopic scale should be conveyed to the macroscopic level in order to relate the constituive laws to material surface properties. To this end both experimental methods and atomistic simulations worth to be explored.