Effect of mixed plastic hardening on the cyclic contact between a sphere and a rigid flat

This paper studies the effect of mixed plasticity mode (combined with isotropic and kinematic hardening law) on the cyclic contact between an elastic-plastic sphere and a rigid flat. Assuming power-law hardening with different levels of mixed plasticity for the sphere, we derived a semi-analytical expression of load versus interference during the first loading and unloading process. During cyclic loading, our results indicate that the isotropic plasticity model shows no variation of residual interference, while kinematic plasticity has the cyclic effect on the residual interference, and this effect is bigger for the material with a higher hardening exponent. In addition, we provided the semi-analytical expression for the evolution of residual interference, which is accurate for the strain hardening exponent from 0.1 to 0.5.