On the numerical solution of line contact problems involving bonded and unbonded strips

This paper investigates the contact problem in which an elastic strip is indented by a rigid body (punch) of arbitrary shape. Both bonded and unbonded strips are considered. A numerical method due to Gladwell (1) † is shown to be a direct and effective technique for analysing the effect of any punch whose profile is a polynomial of degree n, over a range of a/t (semi-contact width to a depth ratio) which is of practical interest 0 ≤ a/t ≤ 10 for Poisson's ratio 0 ≤ v ≤ 0.5. For the cylindrical punch results are presented and compared with Meijers' asymptotic analytic solutions (2). For small a/t agreement is very good as expected. For a/t large, however, there are some large discrepancies which can be traced to an error in Meijers— expression for pressure distribution when v ≠ 0.5. Results are also presented for both the flat and the linear punch.