Contact mechanics is related to the deformation study of solids that meet each other at one or more points. The physical and mathematical formulation of the problem is established upon the mechanics of materials and continuum mechanics and focuses on computations involving bodies with different characteristics in static or dynamic contact. Contact mechanics gives essential information for the s...

Nanoindentation technology has proven to be an effective method to investigate the viscoelastic properties of biological cells. The experimental data obtained by nanoindentation are frequently interpreted by Hertz contact model. However, in order to validate Hertz contact model, some studies assume that cells have infinite thickness which does not necessarily represent the real situation. In th...

We present a force-displacement contact model for the compressive loading of elastoplastic spheres. This model builds from the well known Hertz contact law for elastic, quasistatic compression to incorporate a material's strain-rate-dependent plasticity in order to describe collisions between particles. In the quasistatic regime, finite-element analysis is used to derive an empirical function o...