Investigation of the Material Elasto-Plastic Response under Contact Indentation: the Effect of Indenter Material

When dealing with joints and bearings, high pressures localised at the contact interface lead to residual plastic strain. The present paper combines numerical simulations and experimental tests to investigate the role of the material constitutive law in the indentation process. Numerical indentation tests between similar materials showed a good agreement with the experiments when classical material laws recovered from tensile-compressive tests on bulk samples were accounted for. On the other hand, when simulating indentation between different materials in contact, the comparison between the numerical and experimental results highlighted the limits of using classical material laws. Bilinear material laws were then derived for different steel materials (ASP 2060 PM, 100Cr6, 440C, Marval X12, and Z15 CN17-03) in contact with a ceramic indenter, leading to the correct simulation of the residual indentation profiles (error less than 5%). The proposed approach to determine suitable material laws for indentation between dissimilar materials can be further applied when dealing with applications involving contacts undergoing local plastic deformation.