Constitutive Modeling of Contact for Elastic–Plastic Materials Engaged in Micro/Macroslip

Abstract

One essential model necessary to model frictional contact between two surfaces accurately is a normal contact model. Many existing numerical applications base the normal contact between two surfaces on either a piecewise-linear penalty stiffness type model (designed to prevent excessive penetration of the two surfaces) or a material model that may not be applicable to the surfaces being studied (such as an elastic model when plastic deformation is present, or a Kelvin–Voigt type model that consists of piecewise-linear stiffness and damping to introduce damping for metallic contact). This chapter presents the current state-of-the-art for contact modeling between two metallic surfaces. The model is developed to consider both frictional, oblique contact (of which normal, frictionless contact is a limiting case) and strain hardening effects. The normal contact model is assumed to only couple one-way with the frictional/tangential contact model, which results in the normal contact model being independent of the frictional effects. This assumption is validated to the extent that data is available and is a key assumption for coupling this normal contact model with different frictional models. In this chapter, the frictional, tangential contact is modeled using a microslip model that is developed to consider the pressure distribution that develops from the elastic–plastic normal contact.