In this paper, we present an innovative Boundary Element methodology to deal with 3D elastic adhesive contact mechanics. Crucially, the numerical procedure, which is fully general as it enables the study of both smooth and rough contacts, is based on a novel algorithm to assess the contact area: the contours of the contact patches are determined by imposing that the total energy of the system is stationary. This methodology is successfully validated against the well-known JKR solution involving a smooth sphere in contact with a half-space. Then, to evaluate the robustness of the solver, the multi-asperity contact between a double sine wave surface and an elastic halfspace is studied: specifically, when focusing on two asperities, the coalescence of the related contact patches is shown to be accurately described. Finally, the analysis has been broadened to the contact between rough surfaces: the solution, successfully benchmarked with other numerical methods available in literature, demonstrates that our numerical approach is highly accurate and reliable, thus representing a new efficient methodology to deal with all the contact problems characterized by a certain interfacial energy.
Michele Santeramo, Giuseppe Carbone, Stefan Krenn and Carmine Putignano
