The effect of surface roughness characteristics on the elastic–plastic contact performance

•We develop a combined model with rough surface generating and elastic–plastic contact.•We examine the model comparing with the FEM model.•The influence of kurtosis and skewness is investigated on the contact behaviors.•The influence of different tangent modulus, loads and rms values is considered.

Rough surface elastic–plastic contact performance is investigated in this paper. First, a computer program is developed to generate rough surfaces with given parameters; Then, the elastic–plastic contact model is developed based on minimization of complementary energy and semi-analytical method; finally, contact analysis for rough surfaces are conducted. The results show that kurtosis and skewness have significant effects on the contact performance under light-medium load; for heavy load condition and small skewness, the contact characteristic parameters change slightly along with kurtosis. Comparing with elastic contact, the low contact pressure and large contact area are predicted in elastic–plastic contacts.