A complete elastic-plastic spherical asperity contact model with the effect of isotropic strain hardening

Understanding the deformation behavior of rough surface contacts is essential to minimise the tribological consequences of contacts. Mostly, statistical, deterministic and fractal approaches are adopted to explore the contact of rough surfaces. In statistical approach, a single asperity contact model is developed and extended to the whole surface. In the present work, a deformable spherical asperity contact with a rigid flat is modeled and analysed by accounting the combined effect of Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, yield strength and isotropic strain hardening rate using finite element method. The results reveal that the elastic, elastoplastic and plastic contact states are highly influenced by E/Y ratio and strain hardening rate followed by Poisson's ratio. The dimensionless contact radius is an inadequate parameter to explore the combined effect of material properties. For all E/Y ratio and Poisson's ratio, as the strain hardening rate increases, the dimensionless contact area decreases for the same dimensionless contact load at elastoplastic and fully plastic contact states. As the strain hardening rate increases, the fully plastic contact state is reached at low dimensionless interference compared to elastic perfectly plastic materials for all E/Y ratio and Poisson's ratio. For a common elastic-plastic material, empirical relations are developed to calculate the contact load and contact area appropriately with E/Y ratio, Poisson's ratio and interference ratio as input variables. It can be utilised to study the interaction of rough surface contacts for most of the practical materials.