A Greenwood & Williamson theory for line contact

Analyses of rough surface contact sometimes study the two-dimensional problem to avoid some of the difficulties of three-dimensional contacts, or to reduce the size of the calculations in numerical work. But two-dimensional elastic contacts introduce their own difficulties. The mean real contact pressures will be much lower than in three dimensions, and will depend strongly on the thickness of the ‘slab’ used to represent the elastic half-space.