Influence of reinforcements on the contact performance of composites

A new modeling method was introduced to solve the subsurface stress field of composites under Hertzian contact loads based on the equivalent inclusion method.The comparisons between the computation results solved by the present method and the finite element method demonstrated the effectiveness and advantage of the new method.The parametric study was carried out to investigate the influences of depth,shape,material property,volume fraction and relative location of reinforcements with different shapes on the stress field of the matrix.The analysis results reveal that the maximum von Mises stress is altered due to the changes in the depth,radius and material properties of the reinforcements for the double-reinforcement model,and the volume fraction and relative position of distributed reinforcements have significant influences on the stress field of the matrix.The rolling contact fatigue (RCF) life experiments of titanium-based composites were conducted,the corresponding results verify the capability of the proposed method on solving the contact performance of composites.