Numerical analysis of fretting contacts of dissimilar isotropic and anisotropic materials

A numerical method is presented to obtain the contact tractions when two dissimilar isotropic or anisotropic bodies are in partial slip contact. The solution to the governing coupled singular integral equations (SIEs) is obtained by incorporating the appropriate singular behaviour for the contact pressure and the shear traction. The edges of the contact zone and the stick zone are determined by iteration such that the constant multipliers of the singular functions vanish. For anisotropic materials the out-of-plane shear traction is assumed to be very small and hence neglected. The solution method has been successfully verified by comparing its results to solutions available in the literature and to the results obtained by the finite element method (FEM). By modifying the slip function to take into account the remote stress on the half-space, the SIE method can be used to analyse fretting contact problems. The resulting technique efficiently accounts for the effect of load history on the contact tractions and the contact and stick zone sizes. The pronounced effect that load history has on the stick zone size is illustrated.