On the stress concentration around a hole in a half-plane subject to moving contact loads

We study the stress concentration due to a pore in an elastic half-plane, subject to moving contact loading, in the entire range of possible geometrical parameters (contact area/hole diameter, hole depth/hole diameter). Since the number of cases is very large to study with FEM even with modern machines, the use of a recent simple approximate formula due to Greenwood based on the stress field in the absence of the hole is first attempted, and compared with a full FEM analysis in sample cases. To further distillate the effects of the hole distance from the free surface and of the contact area size, the limiting cases are studied of: (i) concentrated load perpendicular to the surface and aligned with the hole centre; (ii) constant unit pressure on the top surface of the half-plane and (iii) hydrostatic load. A full investigation is then conduced for the case of Hertzian load on the surface, and it is seen that the tensile stress concentration is significantly reduced with respect to that of the concentrated load, when the contact area size is of the same order of the hole radius. Results obtained with the approximate Greenwood formula are generally accurate however only if the hole distance from the surface is greater than two times the hole radius.