Thermoelastic asperity contacts, frictional shear, and parameter correlations

A thermoelastic asperity contact model has been developed for two-dimensional problems. This model takes into account a steady-state hear transfer and the asperity distortion due to thermoelastic deformations. The work reported in this paper further refines the thermoelastic model to include the shear traction effect on the thermoelastic stress distributions and derives semi-empirical relations for the contact pressure, temperature, asperity separation, and contact area, as functions of friction, asperity properties, and material properties. A method of boundary constraint coefficients is developed to facilitate the stress analyses of a half space using a finite computation domain.