Detailed contact pressure between wire rope and friction lining

The authors have studied the contact pressure between a wire rope and a friction lining block. The current study is crucial for the subsequent work on frictional heating under sliding conditions. The contact equations are solved on a fine grid, using multigrid techniques. Results from the numerical contact model show that the local maximum contact pressure is about 45 times higher than the average one obtained from the “plane method” formula. Two approximate analytical calculations are proposed that give a maximum contact pressure with a relative error of the order of 10% with only a small computational effort.