Analysis of the effect of a textured surface on fretting fatigue

This paper analyses the effect of a wavy regular surface texturing on fretting fatigue life, and more specifically, studies the influence of this regular pattern on the initiation and crack propagation phases in fretting fatigue. In this work, an elastic—plastic finite element model (FEM) is used to simulate the contact between a half-plane and a cylindrical punch. In the simulations, three types of geometrical configurations are studied: one in which all of the contacting surfaces are smooth, a second with contact between a smooth half-plane and a cylindrical pad with a wavy surface, and the third that simulates contact between a half-plane with a wavy surface and a smooth cylindrical pad.