An Analytical Approach to Elastic-Plastic Stress Analysis of Rolling Contact

Based on a stress invariant hypothesis and a stress/strain relaxation procedure, an analytical approach is forwarded for approximate determination of residual stresses and strain accumulation in elastic-plastic stress analysis of rolling contact. For line rolling contact problems, the proposed method produces residual stress distributions in favorable agreement with the existing finite element findings. It constitutes a significant improvement over the Merwin-Johnson and the McDowell-Moyar methods established earlier. The proposed approach is employed to study combined rolling and sliding for selected materials, with special attention devoted to 1070 steel behavior. Normal load determines the subsurface residual stresses and the size of the subsurface plastic zone. On the other hand, the influence of tangential force penetrates to a depth of 0.3a, where a is the half width of the contact area, and has diminishing influence on the residual stresses beyond this thin layer. A two-surface plasticity model, commensurate with nonlinear kinematic hardening, is utilized in solution of incremental surface displacements with repeated rolling. It is demonstrated that a driven wheel undergoes greater plastic deformation than the driving wheel, suggesting that the driven wheel experiences enhanced fatigue damage. Furthermore, the calculated residual stresses are compared with the existing experimental data from the literature with exceptional agreements.