The adhesive contact of viscoelastic spheres

We have formulated the restricted self-consistent model for the adhesive contact of linear viscoelastic spheres. This model is a generalization of both the Ting (J. Appl. Mech. 33 (1966) 845) approach to the viscoelastic contact of adhesionless spheres and the restricted self-consistent model for adhesive axisymmetric bodies. We also show how the model can be used in practice by giving a few examples of numerical solutions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.