Mechanics of Fretting and Fretting Fatigue

This book, which has only one very distant forerunner authored by David A. Hills with David Nowell, represents a very big step that is the quantification of these problems and represents the twenty-five years’ worth of work which have gone on at Oxford since the first book on the subject. Fatigue (popularly ‘metal fatigue’) is the primary failure mode of all machines, engines, transmissions and indeed almost all mechanical devices. The propagation of cracks is well understood and is treated in the subject Fracture Mechanics. By contrast, the nucleation of cracks is very hard to quantify and this remains the case with so-called ‘free initiation’ and, to a lesser extent, at cracks nucleated from stress raising features. But the third form of nucleation, where cracks start from the edges of rubbing components, that is, at joints, is potentially a very much better-defined environment, and therefore, the problem is amendable to attack by applied mechanics and experiment. The contents are of value both to those embarking on research on the subject and to practitioner in industry.

Some Fundamentals.-  Plane Elasticity and Half-Plane Contacts.-  Williams’ Solution.-  Half Plane Partial Slip Contact Problems.-  Complete Contacts and their Behaviour.- Representation of Half-plane Contact Edge Behaviour by Asymptotes.- Crack Propagation, Nucleation and Nucleation Modelling.-  Experiments to Measure Fretting Fatigue Strength.

David Hills read Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, and after a short period in industry did a PhD at what was then Trent Polytechnic, where he was made a lecturer. In 1983 he spent a very educational year at the University of Michigan with Maria Comninou and Jim Barber. In 1984 he secured an appointment in the department in which he had incepted, together with a Fellowship at Lincoln College. He has retained these positions, working mainly on fretting, fretting fatigue and contact problems generally.Hendrik N. Andresen graduated from the Technical University of Berlin with a master’s degree in 2017 and began his DPhil studies at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof David A. Hills in the field of contact mechanics the same year. During his studies he gained invaluable professional experience in the automotive and aerospace industries and participated in an exchange programme with the University of Michigan. In 2019 he was a stipendiary lecturer at Lincoln College. He is now pursuing a career in intellectual property law in Berlin.