Contact Stresses of an Elastic Layer Indented by a Concave Rigid Punch

Abstract

In this paper, the authors analyze exactly the stress state of an elastic layer indented by an axisymmetric concave rigid punch when the indented load is small and the contact region is an annulus. Numerical examples are presented for parabolic and conical concave punches. For each case, we show the distributions of surface displacements and contact stresses and clarify the relationships among the parameters of the indented load, the indented depth, the punch face confuguration and the layer's thickness.