Methods for analysing partial contact between surfaces (Q1434652)

The paper shows that it is possible to solve contact problems by the unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function. This method is applied to determining the unknown coefficients of the \(M(x)\) form of the solution of plane periodic elastic contact problems. It is also shown that, in a particular case for which exact solutions are known, only a relatively small number of unknowns are needed in the analysis to obtain good quality answers. Also the effectiveness of the method for analysing efficiently more complex problems, for instance with higher harmonic included to represent approximately the effect of random surfaces, is illustrated with a typical example.