Modeling contact between rigid sphere and elastic layer bonded to rigid substrate

An approximate mechanical model is developed for predicting the radius of c ontact between a sphere and a layered substrate, The complex solution of Ch en and Engel is reduced to the simple root finding procedure for the unknow n contact radius. Numerical data from the model of Chen and Engel are obtai ned for several combinations of layer material,It is shown that with the pr oper selection of dimensionless parameters the numerical results fall on a single curve that is easily correlated, Radius predictions show good agreem ent with experimental measurements.