The understanding of sliding friction for wet, patterned surfaces from first principles is challenging. While emerging applications have sought design principles from biology, a general framework is lacking because soft interfaces experience a multiphysics coupling between solid deformation and fluid dissipation. We investigate the elastohydrodynamic sliding of >50 patterned sliding pairs comprising elastomers, thermosets, and hydrogels, and discover that texturing induces a critical transition in the macroscopic friction coefficient. This critical friction scales universally, without any fitting parameters, with the reduced elastic modulus and the pattern geometry. To capture the frictional dissipation, we separate the flow curve into two regimes and account for the contributions of shear and normal forces applied by the fluid on the patterns. Our model combines Reynolds equations and elastic deformation to provide physical insights that allow engineering of the elastohydrodynamic friction in a class of soft tribopairs using pattern geometry, material elasticity, and fluid properties.
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