An Investigation of Three Dimensional Elastic-Plastic Hemispherical Sliding Contact, Part I: Modeling and Validation

This work presents a three dimensional (3D) finite element analysis (FEA) of an elastic-plastic hemispherical contact model for two hemispherical bodies sliding across each other with various preset vertical interferences. The boundary conditions, model simplifications, and the normalization scheme are presented. Sample results from this FEA investigation are compared to a semi-analytical solution to validate the methodology.