A method to evaluate contact pressure distribution of elastic surfaces using LCP and optimization techniques

Resumo

Contact occurs in various mechanical components such as gears, bearing, wheel and rail of trains, for
which contact fatigue is considered the major cause of failure. For this reason, analyze the stresses in the materials
in contact are of great importance at the study of solid mechanics, in particular tribology, because this allows a
prediction of fails related to the corresponding surfaces. Yet, the elastic contact of bodies is a problem of particular
interest in solid mechanic. The contact between deformable elastic bodies is present in the industry and everyday
life, and it is a challenge to identify and estimate the contact area, as well as the pressure and stress distributions
at the interface and develop efficient numerical methods for solving the problem. Within this context, this work
aims to propose and evaluate a method to calculate the stresses and the contact area between elastic bodies
accurately. The adopted method uses a linear complementarity problem (LCP) approach, obtaining its solution
through optimization techniques.