Numerical strategy for solving general C1-continuous beam-to-beam contact problems

In the context of a multibody numerical environment, when aiming at representing the contact interaction between bodies one needs the inclusion of special mathematical formulations. They can be geometrically described as surface-to-surface or line-to-line contacts, for instance. The last one is usually the natural choice when addressing beam-to-beam contact. In the present work, a geometrically nonlinear structural formulation is combined with a beam-to-beam C-1 spline-based contact formulation with a particular numerical strategy to address challenging contact problems. The numerical strategy consists of introducing criteria to evaluate, characterize and decide about the contact problem solutions. According to these criteria, a contact problem solution may be accepted, rejected, or proceed to a degeneration process (as a simplification of the original tentative for the geometric description). The main advantages of the proposed technique are the lack of special contact formulations for ill-defined contact problems and the automatic switch between degenerated and non-degenerated scenarios. Therefore, one can naturally handle scenarios of pointwise or conformal contact, even in situations of transition between such categories along the model evolution. The adopted spline-based formulation includes normal and tangential contact contributions. To test the proposed strategy, several pointwise and conformal contact examples are proposed.

Automated summary

In the context of a multibody numerical environment, special mathematical formulations are needed to represent contact interaction between bodies. This study combines a geometrically nonlinear structural formulation with a beam-to-beam contact formulation, and introduces a numerical strategy to address challenging contact problems.