Adhesive contact between a rigid body of arbitrary shape and a thin elastic coating

Application of the principle of energy balance to a rigid indenter in contact with elastic layer on a flat rigid substrate provides a very simple derivation of the detachment criterion which earlier has been obtained by much more complicated asymptotic analysis. This criterion allows calculating the adhesive strength of arbitrary contact of a flat-ended indenter, which occurs to be proportional to the area of the face of the indenter and does not depend on its shape. Similarly, the adhesive contact problem can be easily solved in the case of arbitrary three-dimensional shape.