Proposed Project for the MSU Industrial Math Students

Contact Mechanics in Automotive Design

Identify the best modeling practice to assess contact stress between two dissimilarly shaped surfaces pressed together by a force along their common normal. The modeling must consider friction forces that act in a tangential direction when there is relative motion between the surfaces. Deliverable for the project is a module of Matlab code. Inputs to the code likely include a force magnitude that presses the shapes together, shape parameters (principal curvatures of the two surfaces), elastic constants (Elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio), a friction coefficient and a sliding direction (e.g., a vector indicating the direction of relative motion of between two surfaces). The output would be stress (load (Newtons) / unit area (mm^2)). The approach would have to leverage Hertz contact stress theory, but also additional theory that includes the effect of tangential friction loading.

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