Effects of prestress in the coating of an elastic disk

An elastic disk is coated with an elastic rod, uniformly prestressed with a tensile or compressive axial force. The prestress state is assumed to be induced by three different models of external radial load or by ‘shrink-fit’ forcing the coating onto the disk. The prestressed coating/disk system, when loaded with an additional and arbitrary incremental external load, experiences incremental displacement, strain, and stress, which are solved via complex potentials. The analysis incorporates models for both perfect and imperfect bonding at the coating/disk interface. The derived solution highlights the significant influence not only of the prestress but also of the method employed to generate it. These two factors lead, in different ways, to a loss or an increase in incremental stiffness for compressive or tensile prestress. The first bifurcation load of the structure (which differs for different prestress generations) is determined in a perturbative way. The results emphasize the importance of modelling the load and may find applications in flexible electronics and robot arms subject to pressure or uniformly-distributed radial forces.