A Finite Element Study of Elasto-Plastic Hemispherical Contact Against a Rigid Flat

This work presents a finite element study of elasto-plastic hemispherical contact. The results are normalized such that they are valid for macro contacts (e.g., rolling element bearings) and micro contacts (e.g., asperity contact), although micro-scale surface characteristics such as grain boundaries are not considered. The material is modeled as elastic-perfectly plastic. The numerical results are compared to other existing models of spherical contact, including the fully plastic truncation model (often attributed to Abbott and Firestone) and the perfectly elastic case (known as the Hertz contact). This work finds that the fully plastic average contact pressure, or hardness, commonly approximated to be a…

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  Georgia Institute of Technology