Viscoelastic dissipation in repeated normal indentation of an Hertzian profile
Simple exact solutions are known for the indentation problem of a viscoelastic halfspace by a rigid sphere only as long as the contact area is growing. We consider instead a more general cyclic repeated indentation with a pulsating load with a period of zero load. We show that a combination of exact with empirical relaxation solutions coming from simple uniaxial cases is sufficiently accurate to estimate the energy dissipated per cycle, which we report for the standard ”3-elements” solid and periodic half-sine loading for various parameters.
