An Incremental Contact Model for Rough Surfaces of Strain-Hardening Solids

The load-area relation of rough surfaces is of great interest in tribology. For elastic-plastic solids with strain hardening, an incremental model is adopted to analyze the contact of rough surfaces, in which the contact is modeled by accumulation of equivalent circular contacts with varying radius. For three typical rough surfaces with various material properties, comparisons with direct finite element calculations demonstrate the efficiency of this incremental contact model. An approximate linear relation between load and contact area is predicted by both methods up to a contact fraction of 15%. The influence of yield stress and strain-hardening exponent on the load-area proportionality is presented. This work gives a simple while effective method to calculate the load-area relation for rough contact of strain-hardening materials.