SUMMARYAn approximate two-dimensional model for indentation of blunt objects into various types of rigid-perfectly plastic cohesive-frictional material is derived. Particular emphasis is placed on considering indentation as a process involving evolution of the boundary of material displaced by the indenter. Force-penetration relationships are obtained by an incremental approach utilizing key kinematic and static information from indentation of a flat punch. Albeit approximate, the proposed model applies to arbitrary indenter geometry and weightless or ponderable cohesive-frictional materials exhibiting associated or non-associated plastic flow. Two specific indenter geometries, the cylinder and blunt wedge, are explored in detail. Favorable agreement is found between the analytic results and those obtained using the finite element method (FEM). For both the wedge and cylinder, it is further shown that accurate analytic expressions relating indentation force explicitly to penetration can be derived. In the case of the wedge and weightless material, predictions of indentation force obtained from the derived expressions are very close to those computed from implicit equations available in the literature. Copyright ᭧ 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Penetration of a rigid object into plastically deforming material commonly occurs in a number of applications. Tests for evaluating strength of metallic materials, for example, are usually based on indentation of spheres, cones, and pyramids [1]. Likewise, indentation of conical and non-conical objects into soils is a well-recognized practical methodology for determining in situ properties [2]. Indentation also represents a fundamental mode of operation in soil-machine interaction (SMI), where components of agricultural and earth-moving machinery of various types penetrate the soil [3,4]. Additional areas where penetration of an object may be of interest are sediment-object interaction in marine environments and processing of bulk materials.This paper is concerned with theoretically modeling the process of quasi-static normal indentation of blunt, two-dimensional (plane strain) objects into rigid-perfectly plastic cohesive-frictional material. Concentration on the process rather than a particular state necessitates consideration of the evolving contact interface between the indenter and material as well as the evolution of the lips forming next to the indenter, which possess a geometry that is unknown beforehand. Accordingly, the problem belongs to the class of unknown boundary type for which solutions may be non-unique [5,6]. The term 'blunt' implies that the ratio of penetration depth to contact length * Correspondence to: J. P. Hambleton,