Effect of Material Properties in Certain Thermoelastic Contact Problems

When two conforming bodies slide against each other, frictional heating and thermoelastic distortion generally causes the contacting surfaces to become convex and hence leads to a reduction in the size of the contact area. It is shown that, under such circumstances, the contact area is independent of the applied contact loads and the thermal and mechanical fields are linearly proportional to these loads. For two-dimensional problems involving a plane boundary, it is shown that there is a reduced dependence on material properties and in the case of a single material, the solution depends only on a single parameter which can be interpreted as a dimensionless sliding speed. These results extend to both steady-state and transient problems and therefore also characterize the critical sliding speed above which the system is unstable.