A NEW MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF CONTACT TREATMENT BETWEEN AN ORTHOTROPIC MATERIAL AND A RIGID INDENTER

The boundary value problems involving contact are of the great importance in industries related to mechanical and materials engineering. These mixed problems are challenging since a priori unknown deformed surface of the material contacting a rigid indenter is to be determined as a part of the solution. Anisotropic solids represent an important class of engineering materials including crystals, woods, bones, thin solid films, polymer composites, etc. Contact analysis of an anisotropic media, however, is more difficult and is developed less completely in the literature. In this work, both analytical and computational studies of the contact treatment of a semi-infinite orthotropic material indented by a rigid spherical indenter have been considered in two different sections. This approach can be applied to determine the interfacial contact area and pressure distribution for three-dimensional orthotropic materials, and can then be used to calculate the resulting stress and strain fields of the media. Results presented herein can serve as benchmarks with which to compare solutions obtained by ANSYS commercial package.