A Review on Modelling of Viscoelastic Contact Problems

Approaches to solving viscoelastic problems have received extensive attention in recent decades as viscoelastic materials have been widely applied in various fields. An overview of relevant modelling approaches is provided in the paper. The review starts with a brief introduction of some basic terminologies and theories that are commonly used to describe the contact behaviour of viscoelastic materials. By building up the complexity of contact problems, including dry contact, lubricated contact, thermoviscoelastic contact and non-linear viscoelastic contact, tentative analytical solutions are first introduced as essential milestones. Afterwards, a series of numerical models for the various types of contact problems with and without surface roughness are presented and discussed. Examples, in which computational tools were employed to assist the analysis of viscoelastic components in different fields, are given as case studies to demonstrate that a comprehensive numerical framework is currently being developed to address complex viscoelastic contact problems that are prevalent in real life.