Instability of thermoelastic contact for two half-planes sliding out-of-plane with contact resistance and frictional heating

Thermoelastic contact is known to show instabilities when the heat transmitted across the interface depends on the pressure, either because of a pressure-dependent thermal contact resistance R(p) or because of frictional heating due to the product of friction coefficient, speed, and pressure, fVp. Recently, the combined effect of pressure-dependent thermal contact resistance and frictional heating has been studied in the context of simple rod models or for a more realistic elastic conducting half-plane sliding against a rigid perfect conductor "wall". Because R(p) introduces a non-linearity even in full contact, the "critical speed" for the uniform pressure solution to be unstable depends not just on material properties, and geometry, but also on the beat flux and on pressure. Here, the case of two different elastic and conducting half-planes is studied, and frictional heating is shown to, produce significant effects on the stability boundaries with respect to the Zhang and Barber (J. Appl. Mech. 57 (1990) 365) corresponding case with no sliding. In particular, frictional heating makes instability possible for a larger range of prescribed temperature drop at the interface including, at sufficiently high speeds, the region of opposite sign of that giving instability in the corresponding static case. The effect of frictional heating is particularly relevant for one material combinations of the Zhang and Barber (J. Appl. Mech. 57 (1990) 365) classification (denominated class b here), as above a certain critical speed, the system is unstable regardless of temperature drop at the interface. Finally, if the system has a prescribed heat flow into one of the materials, the results are similar, except that frictional heating may also become a stabilizing effect, if the resistance function and the material properties satisfy a certain condition. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.