Subsurface stress evolution under orthotropic wear and frictional contact conditions

Abstract

This work presents a computational framework to study the evolution of the subsurface stresses in 3D solids under orthotropic frictional contact and wear conditions. The formulation is based on the influence coefficients methodology to relate the discrete elastic response (i.e., displacements and stresses) to the sampled excitation (i.e., surface contact tractions). The proposed methodology is validated by solving several benchmark problems and is applied to analyze how the subsurface stress distribution (i.e. maximum value and its location) – and its evolution – caused by orthotropic wear conditions are clearly affected not only by the considered wear problems (i.e., sliding wear or fretting wear) but also by the friction coefficient values and the sliding direction angle — relative to the tribological axes. Several numerical examples are presented to show the importance of these last two aspects when orthotropic wear conditions are considered. In other case, we could over- or underestimate the maximum values of the subsurface stresses during the wear process.