Contact mechanics of adhesive beams. Part I: Moderate indentation

We investigate the contact of a rigid cylindrical punch with an adhesive beam mounted on flexible end supports. Adhesion is modeled through an adhesive zone model. The resulting Fredholm integral equation of the first kind is solved by a Galerkin projection method in terms of Chebyshev polynomials. Results are reported for several combinations of adhesive strengths, beam thickness, and support flexibilities characterized through torsional and vertical translational spring stiffnesses. Special attention is paid to the important extreme cases of clamped and simply supported beams. The popular Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model for adhesion is obtained as a limit of the adhesive zone model. Finally, we compare our predictions with preliminary experiments and also demonstrate the utility of our approach in modeling complex structural adhesives.