MODELING CONTACT ACCURATELY USING LOCALIZED ENRICHMENT

摘要

Traditional finite element method requires very high density mesh and nonlinear analysis to obtain reasonably accurate solutions for elastic contact problems. Analytical solutions are available for these problems based on Hertz theory of elastic contact. In this paper we show that using implicit boundary approach, solutions that are of similar accuracy can be obtained without the need for nonlinear analysis. This approach is applied here only for tied contacts so that there is no sliding or separation. Contacting bodies are modeled as an assembly of parts and a separate background mesh is constructed for each part. At the contact, elements of the mesh belonging to the contacting parts overlap. A trial function is constructed such that the displacements are continuous at the contact. The goal is to capture the stresses as accurately as possible using sufficiently dense global mesh. Several elastic contact problems including classical point and line contact problems are used to study the effectiveness of this approach.