A Numerical Solution for Fretting Contacts

When two surfaces in static contacts are subjected to combined loads applied in the normal and tangential directions, or just a normal load for dissimilar materials, microscopic slip would take place at certain areas of the contact region even though the contacting bodies remain still without macroscopic movement. The micro-slip is considered a major cause of fretting wear for the materials in contacts under alternating dynamic load or vibration, referred as the fretting contacts in this study. The fretting contact problem was solved using a semi-analytical method (SAM), in which analytical relations between a unite stress and corresponding surface displacement were obtained on the basis of Green functions. The contact pressure and shear tractions were then calculated by minimizing the complementary energy, and by a numerical procedure based on Conjugate Gradient Method (CGM) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique. The algorithm is very effective since the meshes are applied to the positions just in the contact areas of interest, which saves the computing time. The fretting contacts of dissimilar materials were studied and the effects of surface roughness were analyzed. Results show that the coupled effects of shear traction and material dissimilarity make the traction distributions quite different with the solutions from similar materials. The solutions under dynamic load depend on the path or history of the loading process, but the stress distributions and load-displacement curves will quickly converge to a periodic stability after several load cycles.