A FRICTIONAL CONTACT ELEMENT FOR STRONGLY CURVED CONTACT PROBLEMS

Based on a mixed formulation approach, africtional contact element is proposed for the numerical solution of contact problems including strongly curved rigid obstacles. The implementation of the frictional contact element is analogous to that of a finite element. This feature facilitates its implementation in implicit finite element programmes, since the structure of the code need not be modified. For efficient modelling of the forming tool geometries by Computer Aided Geometric Design techniques and in order to achieve a high performance of the contact search, the numerical schemes of the frictional contact element operate directly on parametric polynomial surface patches. Thus, no discretization of curved contact surfaces is performed. Numerical simulations of deep drawing processes demonstrate the performance of the method in the case of large sliding increments upon curved tools and in the case of elasto-plasticity.