Applicability of half-space-based methods to non-conforming elastic normal contact problems

The accuracy of half-space-based methods is evaluated by the Finite Element (FE) method. Schematic diagrams of the model is shown in Fig. A(a) and (b). Significant dimensions of the contact body are varied relative to the characteristic size of the contact patch, as shown in Fig. A(c). The comparison of contact pressures for three critical combinations of significant dimensions is shown in Fig. A(d). The difference is not large even for the most critical significant dimension, i.e. 1.1x the characteristic size of the contact patch.102