The Hysteretic Behaviour of Partial Slip Elastic Contacts Undergoing a Fretting Loop

Fretting defines an intrinsically multidisciplinary process, involving adhesion, oxidation, abrasion and pitting, in which mechanical contacts are subjected to alternating tangential displacements, small compared to dimensions of contact area. Assessment of hysteretic behaviour of stress and strain state in the contacting bodies is the main goal of this paper, which employs numerical analysis to extend the few existing analytical results to technologically important contact scenarios. An incremental iterative algorithm based on three levels of iterations, fully incorporating the interconnectivity between normal and tangential tractions, is reviewed in this work and used to simulate the hysteretic behaviour of partial slip elastic contacts undergoing fretting. Numerical simulations suggest that the fretting contact between dissimilarly elastic materials exhibits a unique path in the first two loading cycles, and then stabilizes with subsequent oscillating loading to a fixed trajectory, as in case of similarly elastic materials.