Improved Pressure Distribution in Elliptic Elastic Contacts between High-Order Surfaces

Abstract

The improvement of mechanical contacts or microcontacts seeks a nearly uniform current density over most of contact area. When microtopography is homogeneous, this aim is achieved if nominal shape of contacting surfaces yields a nearly uniform central pressure which decreases monotonously to zero in contour points. These authors derived recently this shape for circular contacts by employing high-order surfaces. This paper extends this result to elliptical contacts. Some results are used to this end, derived for elliptical elastic contacts between high-order surfaces. As homogeneous high order surfaces lead to a highly nonuniform pressure distribution, central pressure is flattened by making the first derivatives of pressure vanish in contact center. Then, the contacts between fourth, sixth, and eighth, order surfaces are analyzed and recurrence relations for pressure distribution and contact parameters are proposed.