A penalty-based contact element for pipe and 3D rigid body interaction

In this paper a contact element tailor-made for global response prediction of pipelines subject to interaction with rigid 3-dimensional bodies is presented. A continuous representation of the contact geometry is applied. The contact contribution to virtual work and associated linearizations are presented on matrix format suitable for implementation into computer codes based on a co-rotated description of beam kinematics. Experimental tests of trawl gear and subsea pipeline interference are used to validate the performance of the element. The benefit of including a tangent stiffness matrix proportional to the normal contact force and the effect of performing artificial symmetrization of the linearized friction contribution are investigated in terms of numerical efficiency.