Indentation of a surface-stiffened elastic substrate

The paper deals with the problem of the indentation of a substrate in the form of an isotropic elastic halfspace that is reinforced at the surface by a bonded layer, which has flexibility characteristic of a Poisson-Kirchhoff-Germain thin plate. The presence of the reinforcing layer changes the characteristics of the indentation problem, in that the techniques that are applicable for the solution of the direct indentation of the halfspace cannot be applied to develop a load-displacement relationship for the indenter. The integro-differential equation governing the indentation of the surface reinforced halfspace is solved using a discretization approach and numerical results are presented to demonstrate the influence of the stiffness of the reinforcing layer on the Boussinesq indention problem.