ON THE NUMERICAL-SOLUTION OF LINE CONTACT PROBLEMS INVOLVING BONDED AND UNBONDED STRIPS

This paper investigates the contact problem in which an elastic strip is indented by a rigid body (punch) of arbitrary shape. Both bonded and unbonded strips are considered. A numerical method due to Gladwell is shown to be a direct and effective technique for analyzing the effect of any punch whose profile is a polynomial of degree n, over a range of a/t (semi-contact width to a depth ratio) which is of practical interest 0 &le a/t &le 10 for Poisson's ratio 0 &le v &le 0.5. For the cylindrical punch results are presented and compared with Meijer's asymptotic analytic solutions. For small a/t agreement is very good as expected. For a/t large, however, there are some large discrepancies which can be traced to an error in Meijer's expression for pressure distribution when v ≠ 0.5. Results are also presented for both the flat and the linear punch.