Direct analysis of three-dimensional elastic-plastic rolling contact

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate a novel treatment of a direct procedure for elastic-plastic analysis and shakedown including its application to problems in three-dimensional rolling contact. In this approach, the elastic-plastic problem is transformed into a purely elastic problem and a residual problem. The three-dimensional problem is further split into a plane problem and an anti-plane problem an advantage of this approach to other methods is that, the final shakedown solution is obtained directly by solving elasticity problems. Results are compared with full elastic-plastic finite element calculations and a good agreement is observed. Finally, the direct approach is shown to be a straightforward and efficient method for the analysis of three-dimensional problems.