Indentation of an incompressible inhomogeneous layer by a rigid circular indenter

This work deals with an incompressible inhomogeneous layer bondedto a rigid substrate and indented without friction by a rigidcircular indenter. The corresponding mixed boundary-value problemof elasticity is reduced to equivalent dual integral equations.It is shown that the pliability function in these equationsmay be found from a system of nonlinear differential equationsand that its behaviour is peculiar when the elastic medium isincompressible. A novel technique taking into account this peculiarityis developed in order to reduce the dual integral equationsto Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with symmetricstrictly coercive operators. For a homogeneous layer and a flatindenter, the structure of the Fredholm integral equations permitsan approximate analytical solution which is very accurate forany layer thickness. For an indenter of three-dimensional profile,leading asymptotic terms of the solution are derived in thecase of a thin inhomogeneous layer.