Contact Analysis of a Soft-Coated Asperity During Loading–Unloading Process in Consideration of Strain Hardening Effects

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the flattening process of a coated single asperity by a rigid flat is studied based on a two-dimensional finite element model under different contact interferences. The soft coating and hard substrate materials of the main bearing shell in a medium-speed vehicle diesel engine are both considered to follow the power-law hardening elastic-plastic properties. For both loading and unloading processes, the effects of geometrical and material properties, including the coating thickness, Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio, yielding stress, and hardening exponent, on the contact behaviors are studied in a wide range to cover the real material properties. The von Mises stress on the interface is also analyzed in order to improve the bonding strength between coating and substrate. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a method to determine the contact properties caused by different material and geometric properties of soft coating and substrate materials, which follow the power-law hardening properties.