Contact Mechanics of a Thin Layer Pressed Onto a Substrate by a Line Load

A fundamental plane frictional receding contact of a thin layer pressed onto a substrate is solved with the insertion of distributions of dislocations. The new formulation overcomes the restriction of standard contact analysis with the distributed dislocation technique, which requires the distributions to be square root bounded to zero or square root singular at the ends of the area of insertion. This new formulation opens up a range of plane frictional receding contacts to theoretical study. Solutions are obtained for the basic plane receding contact problem of a homogeneous linear elastic semi-infinite layer pressed by a line load onto a half-plane of the same material with a Coulomb friction interface. The frictional dependence of receding contact behavior is identified and discussed.