A formulation to define the contact surface in the 2D mortar finite element method

摘要

A new implementation of the mortar method is proposed to solve 2Dcontact problems. The size of the contact zone can be varied continuously by means of the definition of an intermediate contact surface. It has been proved that this is equivalent to using special shape functions for the interpolation of the contact pressure. A formulation is proposed to find the correct size of the contact zone that minimizes the lack of smoothness of the contact pressure.