Elasto-Plastic Hemispherical Contact Models for Various Mechanical Properties

This work uses the finite element technique to model the elasto-plastic deformation of a hemisphere contacting a rigid flat for various material properties typical of aluminum, bronze, copper, titanium and malleable cast iron. Additionally, this work conducted parametric FEM tests on a generic material in which the elastic modulus and Poisson’s ratio are varied independently while the yield strength is held constant. A larger spectrum of material properties are covered in this work than in most previous works. The results are compared to two previously formulated elasto-plastic models simulating the deformation of a hemisphere in contact with a rigid flat. Both of the previously formulated models use carbon steel mechanical properties to arrive at empirical formulations implied to pertain to various materials. While both models considered several carbon steels with varying yield strengths, they did not test materials with varying Poisson’s ratio or elastic modulus. The previously generated elasto-plastic models give fairly good predictions when compared to the FEM results for various material properties from the current work, except that one model produces more accurate predictions overall, especially at large deformations where other models neglect important trends due to decreases in “hardness” with increasing deformation.