Sensitivity analysis for frictional contact problems in the augmented Lagrangian formulation

Direct differentiation method of sensitivity analysis is developed for frictional contact problems. As a result of the augmented Lagrangian treatment of contact constraints, the direct problem is solved simultaneously for the displacements and Lagrange multipliers using the Newton method. The main purpose of the paper is to show that this formulation of the augmented Lagrangian method is particularly suitable for sensitivity analysis because the direct differentiation method leads to a non-iterative exact sensitivity problem to be solved at each time increment. The approach is applied to a general class of three-dimensional frictional contact problems, and numerical examples are provided involving large deformations, multibody contact interactions, and contact smoothing techniques. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.