A Shell Frictionally Coupled to an Elastic Foundation and a Comparison Against the Two-Body Coulomb's Law of Static Friction

Abstract

In this article, we derive a model for a shell that is frictionally coupled to an elastic foundation. We use Kikuchi and Oden's model for Coulomb's law of static friction to derive a displacement-based static-friction law for a shell on an elastic foundation model, and we prove the existence and the uniqueness of solutions with the aid of the work of Kinderlehrer and Stampacchia. For numerical analysis, we modify Kikuchi and Oden's model for Coulomb's law of static friction to model a full two-body contact problem in curvilinear coordinates. Our numerical results indicate that if the shell has a relatively high Young's modulus or has a relatively high Poisson's ratio, and the contact region has a high coefficient of friction or has a high radius of curvature, then the displacement field of the foundation predicted by both models are in better agreement. As far as we are aware, this is the first derivation of a displacement-based friction law and a two-body 3D elasticity contact problem with friction in the literature.