A STUDY ON THE CONTACT PROBLEM OF A LAYER CONSISTING OF FUNCTIONALLY GRADED MATERIAL (FGM) IN THE PRESENCE OF BODY FORCE

One of the most important components of the early design process for layered systems is gaining a knowledge of the behavior of materials under varied contact situations. Functionally graded materials (FGMs) have grown in popularity in layered systems as a result of their numerous benefits, such as permitting the reduction of local stress concentrations and thermal stresses often experienced in traditional composites. This paper suggests an analytical approach to solving the continuous and discontinuous contact problems of a functionally graded (FG) layer subjected to a distributed load. Elasticity theory and integral transform methods provide the basis of the aforementioned analytical approach. The FG layer rests on a half-plane that is homogeneous, and there is no adhesion or bonding at the contact surface. For this problem, we assume an exponentially varying shear modulus and mass density in the FG layer. In the solution, the body force of the FG layer is considered. The problem is solved analytically by applying boundary conditions for both continuous and discontinuous contact cases. The presented results show the effects of load factor, amplitude of distributed load, inhomogeneity parameters, and interface material property mismatch on contact stress distributions, initial separation load (critical load), initial separation distance, starting and end point of separation, and separation interval.