Contact with friction between beams in 3-D space

In this paper a formulation to deal with friction between straight beams undergoing large displacements in 3-D space is proposed. The detection of the contact point and the computation of the amount of sliding are carried out using a completely symmetric treatment between the two contacting beams. Starting from the virtual work equation the consistent linearization of the frictional contact contribution is computed and the complete equation set is arranged in matrix form suitable for FE implementation. Some numerical examples are added to show the e ectiveness of the method