Analysis of a cylinder-to-flat contact problem at finite elasto-plastic strains

• The cylinder to flat contact problem is analyzed.
• Experimental tests are compared to analytical and numerical results.
• Three different elasto-plastic materials widely used in engineering are studied.
• The material behavior is numerically modeled using the von Mises constitutive model.
• A study of the contact surface, pressure and effective plastic strain is presented.

In this work, the elasto-plastic contact of a cylinder against a flat surface is experimentally investigated and compared with the predictions obtained with a recently proposed finite element contact framework (Doca et al. (2014) [1]). The analysis is performed for three different materials and includes all stages of deformation ranging from elastic Hertzian contact through elasto-plastic deformation to finite deformation plastic contact. The behaviors of the contact length and contact pressure are presented as well as the comparison between predicted and measured specimen profiles. The evolution of the effective plastic strain is also reported. The results clearly demonstrate the ability of the contact formulation to capture the behavior of the elasto-plastic contact of a cylinder against a flat surface that is experimentally observed.