A NOVEL THREE-DIMENSIONAL CONTACT FINITE ELEMENT BASED ON SMOOTH PRESSURE INTERPOLATIONS
R.E. Jones and P. Papadopoulos Int. J. Num. Meth. Engrg., 51, pp. 791-811, (2001)

Abstract
This article proposes a new three-dimensional contact finite element which employs continuous and weakly coupled pressure interpolations on each of the interacting boundaries. The resulting formulation circumvents the geometric bias of one-pass methods, as well as the surface locking of traditional two-pass node-on-surface methods. A Lagrange multiplier implementation of the proposed element is validated for frictionless quasi-static contact by a series of numerical simulations.


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