Adhesive contact between two-dimensional anisotropic elastic bodies

Adhesion plays a vital role in the design of smart and intelligent high-tech devices such as modern optical, microelectromechanical, and biomedical systems. However, in the literature, adhesive contact is mostly considered for contact of rigid substrates and transversely isotropic and isotropic elastic materials. The composite materials are increasingly used in the mart and intelligent high-tech devices. Since the composite materials are generally anisotropic and contact bodies are all deformable, it is more practical to consider the adhesive contact of two anisotropic elastic materials. In this paper, an adhesive contact model of anisotropic elastic bodies is established, and the closed-form solutions for two-dimensional adhesive contact of two anisotropic elastic bodies are derived. The full-field solutions and the relation for the contact region and applied force are developed using the Stroh complex variable formalism, the analytical continuation method, and concepts of the JKR adhesive model. We will show that the frictionless contact of two anisotropic elastic materials is just a special case of the present contact problem, and its solutions can be obtained by setting the work of adhesion equal to zero. In addition, we also show that our present solutions are valid for the problems of indentation by a rigid punch on an elastic half-space through a proper placement of the contact radius and the corresponding material constant. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy, applicability, and versatility of the developed solutions.