On the approximate solution of elastic contact problems for a circular annulus

Paper concerns the Boussinesq and Reissner-Sagoci contact problems for a rigid punch in contact with the plane face of an isotropic elastic half-space over a circular annulusbra. It is shown that a simple combination of the interior and exterior Dirichlet and Neumann solutions for a circle, when expressed in terms of oblate spheriodal coordinates, yields extremely accurate approximate solutions provided that 0b/a0.8.