Experimental investigation of fully plastic contact of a sphere against a hard flat

In this paper we report the experimental investigation to evaluate the published models for the contact of a deformable sphere against a hard flat in the fully plastic contact regime. A new measurement method has been used to measure the contact area. The behavior of the mean contact pressure and the contact area as a function of the contact load are presented. Substantial differences are found between the measurements and the model predictions. A constant value of the mean contact pressure as the load increases is observed, however, the value is lower than the hardness, as often reported. The contact area is found to be a simple truncation of the sphere by a hard flat.