Isogeometric collocation for large deformation elasticity and frictional contact problems

Isogeometric collocation methods have been recently proposed as an alternative to standard Galerkin approaches as they provide a significant reduction in computational cost for higher-order discretizations. In this work, we explore the application of isogeometric collocation to large deformation elasticity and frictional contact problems. We first derive the non-linear governing equations for the elasticity problem with finite deformation kinematics and provide details on their consistent linearization. Some numerical examples demonstrate the performance of collocation in its basic and enhanced versions, differing by the enforcement of Neumann boundary conditions. For problems with strong singularities, enhanced collocation is shown to outperform basic collocation and to lead to a spatial convergence behavior very similar to Galerkin, whereas for weaker or no singularities enhanced and basic collocation may give very similar results. A large deformation contact formulation is subsequently developed and tested in the frictional setting, where collocation confirms the excellent performance already obtained for the frictionless case. Finally, it is shown that the contact formulation in the collocation framework passes the contact patch test to machine precision in a three-dimensional setting with arbitrarily inclined non-matching discretizations, thus outperforming most of the available contact formulations and all those with pointwise enforcement of the contact constraints. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.