Mortar Contact FORMULATION FOR HIERARCHICAL BASIS FUNCTIONS USING SMOOTH ACTIVE SET STRATEGY

This work focuses on 3D modelling of elastic two-body frictionless contact by means of the mortar method for small strains extended for hierarchical shape functions. Surfaces of two bodies discretised by tetrahedral elements are denoted as master and slave surfaces. When two triangular faces of tetrahedral elements are candidates for contact, with one face belonging to the master and the other to the slave surface, they are used to create a special prism element. These prisms are used as integration domains to solve the contact problem. For a given prism configuration, triangular faces can either be in contact or form a gap denoting an active or passive state, respectively. This state is determined by evaluation of the complementarity function proposed in [1], that is modified in the present work to yield a smooth Newton algorithm. Finally, results for sphere-to-sphere Hertz contact are compared to analytical solution for different orders of approximation.