Closure to “Discussion of ‘Experimental Investigation of Fully Plastic Contact of a Sphere Against a Hard Flat’ ” (2007, ASME J. Tribol., 129, p. 700)

Abstract

The authors thank the reviewers' (Dr. Jackson and Dr. Green) interest in the paper arising several issues for discussion. We agree with the reviewers that even in the fully plastic regime there will be some elastic recovery. However, this elastic recovery is very small (relatively) compared to the total deformation, which in turn, the effect to the contact area is very small as well. The measurement method used has a lateral resolution of 1μm or about 0.1% of the measured plastic contact area. We have been investigating the effect of the roughness to the contact area and mean contact pressure, see (1). We concluded that in our experiments the effect of the roughness is negligible.