COVARIANT DESCRIPTION OF ANISOTROPIC CONTACT SURFACES

Summary. Considering contact between bodies whose surfaces can be described by algorithmically organized asperities, e.g. after the machining processes, leads to a gen-eral problem of anisotropic frictional contact. A covariant contact description allows to generalize all contact characteristics of these surfaces into an anisotropic domain for both adhesion and sliding behavior in a straightforward form as well as to construct an eective numerical algorithm within an iterative solution scheme of a Newton's type. Numerical examples show the possibility to describe the average behavior of machined surfaces.