A theoretical model to predict normal contact characteristics for elasto-plastic collisions

This article presents a theoretical prediction of elasto-plastic collision during normal impact. A new theoretical model is proposed to estimate coefficient of restitution and contact force–displacement characteristics during elasto-plastic collision. The proposed model can be considered as a modified version of Thornton’s model which comes into a very good agreement with FEA and experimental works. This model takes care of non-local plasticity as well as uniform pressure distribution instead of constant pressure distribution in core contact region in plastic phase. Concept of contact ring is proposed for first time in this article. The effect of adhesion on the proposed contact model is also discussed in this article. The validity of proposed contact model for a wide range of impact velocity proofs the model to be robust.