Incorporation of contact for high-order finite elements in covariant form

✍ Scribed by Alexander Konyukhov; Karl Schweizerhof

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 672 KB
• Volume: 198
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0045-7825
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cma.2008.04.023

✦ Synopsis

The covariant contact description is applied to incorporate the treatment of contact problems into a highorder finite element technique. A hierarchical enrichment of the shape functions space allows to construct a contact layer finite element combining both exact geometry representation for contact surfaces, and a mesh with linear shape functions for the interior of the contacting bodies. The developed contact approach can be viewed as a smoothing technique for linear meshes as well as a general application of high-order FEM. The good approximation property for the developed contact layer elements is shown for the classical Hertz problem even within a few contact elements discretizing the contact zone.