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Selection of appropriate materials for a particular application is an important requirement in the context of modern industrial growth and use of advanced machineries, where, invariably there is relative motion between contacting surfaces of different machine parts. Contact phenomena are frequently encountered in belts, rolling element bearings, cam-follower mechanisms, gears etc (Song et al., 2013). Hence, study of contact at different scales is an interesting and critical domain of research, specifically, from the point of view of advanced class of material, such as nanocomposites. These materials have gained popularity recently in various fields due to their superior mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. It has been proved that carbon nanotube (CNT) embedded matrix materials exhibit significant improvement in their properties (Kirtania and Chakraborty, 2018). It is, therefore, necessary to investigate contact behaviour of CNT based nanocomposites and analyze the variation of relevant contact parameters across the contact interface.
Numerous scholars have recently focused on numerical Analysis to comprehend contact phenomena of different materials. Brake (2012) created a novel elastic-plastic contact model for various material qualities and contact geometries. The Hertz solution, a mixed elastic-plastic regime based on continuity and a fully plastic regime based on a linear force-deflection constitutive relationship were taken into account when developing the model. Buczkowski et al. (2014) used fractal theory to determine the normal contact stiffness for rough and smooth isotropic surfaces pressed against one another. This theory is based on a single variable Weierstrass-Mandelbrot function. The influence of shifting elastic modulus in a non-adhesive frictionless bulk deformation contact between an isotropic self-affine fractal surface and a rigid flat covering elastic, elastic-plastic, and plastic region was studied by Chatterjee and Sahoo (2014) using a finite element simulation. Wang et al. (2019) created the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman damage model and Finite Element (FE) flattening model. They examined the impact of peak load during flattening operation on thickness, length and radius. By creating a finite element model, Peng et al. (2013) investigated the impact of the yield stress to elasticity modulus ratio on the contact behaviour. The findings indicate that the contact behaviour was impacted, however at high interference, the hemisphere base border condition had a significant impact. Wang et al. (2022) created an analytical contact model for predicting the contact area and contact force for Gaussian rough surfaces that are perfectly elastic or elastic-perfectly plastic. The authors proved that the elastoplastic contact behaviour converged towards totally plastic contact behaviour as plastic parameters rose. Ogar et al. (2021) created an analytical model for forecasting residual stress during flattening operations. The model was created using dimensionless equations. For various hardening power laws, the model was compared to a FEM flattening model. Wang and Xiang (2013) examined the tangential contact properties of a single hemispherical asperity under normal elastic-plastic deformation by the finite element method. Gandhi et al. (2012) used FE analysis and analytical methods to investigate the impact of tangent modulus on the behaviour of a frictionless elastic-plastic contact for different materials. It was found that when the tangent modulus increased, the hardness increased and the projected contact area of the indentation decreased. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was used by Megalingam and Mayuram (2014) to create Gaussian rough surfaces, and Finite Element Method (FEM) was used to create a 3D contact model. It was shown that asperities on surfaces with low surface roughness primarily deform elastically, whereas significant elastoplastic and plastic deformation occurred on surfaces with medium and high surface roughness. In order to calculate the tangential and normal contact forces for sliding contact between elastic and plastic spheres, Jackson et al. (2007) developed a computational model.