A New Numerical Technique for Computing Surface Elastic Deformation Caused by a Given Normal Pressure Distribution

Abstract

This paper presents a new numerical method for computing the elastic normal surface displacement field caused by a given normal pressure distribution. The pressure function is approximated by a piecewise biquadratic polynomial on the whole domain analyzed, and the deformation of every node is expressed as a linear combination of the nodal pressures whose coefficients can be combined into a deformation matrix. Consequently, the iterative calculation of elastic deformation is simplified and the amount of work is greatly reduced. It has been proved, in addition, that the numerical accuracy of the new method is higher than that of some others.