Modeling And Analysis Of Elasto-plastic Sliding Contact Between Fractal Body And Flat Plane

A nominally flat engineering surface contains peaks and valleys. Realcontact between two surfaces occurs only at the asperities, which resulted inthe fact that the asperities in real contact carry high load and are prone toelasto-plastic deformation. The frictional heat generated between thecontacting surfaces is vital to the material’s friction and wear properties.Because it not only affects the mechanical and thermal properties of contactingcomponents’ materials considerably, but it also complicate the load condition ofthe components. Obviously, it is significantly important both in theory and inpractice to study the material behavior of contacting components in microscale.The recent development of the topic was summarized and the trend of theresearch has been pointed out. A model containing an elasto-plastic flat planeand an elasto-plastic fractal body has been constructed, the rough of which wasgenerated by using the Weierstrass-Mandelbrot fractal function. The model wassolved using the commercial FEM software ABAQUS considering the fullycoupled thermal and mechanical effects.The results have been analyzed in terms of real contact area, contactpressure, temperature field, and stress distribution. The real contact areaincreases linearly with applied load and fluctuates during sliding. The contactpressure and temperature distribute only at the asperities in real contact. Theequivalent stresses have been interpreted in light of VonMises and Trescaprinciple. It is shown that the maximum stress lies on the surface or thesubsurface and the conclusion can be used to explain the failure of material.The interaction between real contact area, contact pressure, temperature andstress has explained. At the end, the results obtained above were compared withthose of the same model without considering the coupled thermal andmechanical effect to show the affect on real contact area, contact pressure andequivalent stresses of frictional heat.The model constructed considering the elasto-plastic deformation of the contact components and coupled effects of mechanical and thermal properlydescribed the real engineering situation, thus the conclusions obtained arevaluable to the further development of the topic.