THREE-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE CRACK ANALYSIS OF ELASTIC HALF-SPACE UNDER ROLLING CONTACT LOAD

Abstract

In this work a three-dimensional planar crack on the surface of elastic half-space was analyzed under rolling contact load. The stresses interior to an elastic half-space body under rolling contact load and those produced by an infinitesimal displacement jump loop for the elastic half-space body were used to reduce the planar crack problem to the solution of a system of two-dimensional hypersingular integral equations with unknown displacement jump. The ideas of finite element discretization were employed to construct numerical solution schemes for solving the integral equations. An appropriate treatment of the associated hypersingular integral in the numerical solution to the integral equations was proposed in Hadamard's finite-part integral sense. The numerical results showed that the present procedure yields solutions with high accuracies. The stress intensity factors near the crack front edge under rolling contact load were indicated in graphical form with varying the crack shape, the radius of rolling contact zone and the friction coefficients, respectively. In addition, the influence of the lubricant infiltrating the crack surfaces on the crack propagation was also discussed in the paper.