Boundary element method for normal non-adhesive and adhesive contacts of power-law graded elastic materials

Abstract: Recently proposed formulation of the Boundary Element Method for adhesive contacts has been generalized for contacts of functionally graded materials with and without adhesion. First, proceeding from the fundamental solution for single force acting on the surface of a half space with a power-law varying elastic modulus, the deformation produced by constant pressure acting on a rectangular element was calculated and the influence matrix was obtained for a rectangular grid. The inverse problem for the calculation of required stress in contact area from a known surface deformation was solved by use of conjugate-gradient technique. For the transformation between the stresses and displacements, the Fast Fourier Transformation is used which drastically reduces the computation time. For the adhesive contact of graded material, the detachment criterion based on the method of Pohrt and Popov was proposed. A number of numerical test for the problem having exact analytical solution have been carried out confirming the correctness of underlying ideas and numerical implementation.