Wear through the plastic interaction of cylindrical asperities in sliding (Q1804403)

Pummelling is a technological process which consists in eliminating the asperities of an extruded soft surface by sliding on it a hard ball with a flat ground. The soft surface is not perfectly flat, but has randomly distributed asperities which generate high contact stresses everytime they are flattened by the action of the hard slider. The contact stresses are severe immediately below the asperities, and there the soft surface becomes plastic. The problem thus arises of deciding whether, after subsequent passages of the hard sphere over the asperities, the soft material undergoes shakedown to an elastic steady state without creation of further plastic regions. The answer can be obtained by a theorem due to Koiter, which gives a necessary condition on the load in order that shakedown is possible. If the applied load exceeds this limit, then shakedown is impossible and plastic deformation must occur with every cycle of load. The authors analyze three possible mechanisms of plastic deformation that are consistent with experimental observations, and arrive at the conclusion that the shakedown limit is not strongly dependent on the shape of the contacting surfaces.