A contact smoothing method for arbitrary surface meshes using Nagata patches

This paper presents a contact surface smoothing method combined with the node-to-segment discretization technique to solve large deformation frictional contact problems between deformable bodies. The Nagata patch interpolation is used to smooth the surface mesh, providing a master surface with quasi-G(1) continuity between patches. Moreover, the local support of the interpolation method allows to deal with surface meshes of arbitrary topology (regular and irregular finite element discretizations), as well as hybrid meshes. The non-physical oscillations in the contact force evolution, induced by the faceted contact surface representation, are reduced using the proposed smoothing method. Furthermore, the smooth representation of the master surface allows a more accurately evaluation of the resulting stresses and forces, while providing an important improvement in convergence behaviour. Four representative numerical examples are used to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed contact smoothing method. The results show a significant improvement in the accuracy, robustness and performance of the numerical simulations using the smoothing approach, when compared with the piecewise faceted contact surface description. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.