An optimization design of contact interface material stiffness for improving the uniformity of the contact pressure

Material stiffness, a significant parameter of a contact interface, is investigated to improve the uniformity of the contact pressure. A contact interface material stiffness optimization design algorithm is developed based on the modified solid isotropic material with the penalization (SIMP) method. The uniformity of the contact pressure field is represented by its variance and is defined as the optimization objective. A node-to-node frictionless elastic contact theory is adopted to perform the contact analysis. The effectiveness of the interface material stiffness design for improving the uniformity of the contact surface is verified based on two contact cases. Because the relationship between the material stiffness and the hard-and-soft degree of a contact interface is always a positive correlation, the results in this paper could be extended so that the design of the contact interfaces' hard-and-soft degree will improve the distributing uniformity of the contact surface.