ON THE TREATMENT OF INEQUALITY CONSTRAINTS ARISING FROM CONTACT CONDITIONS IN FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Existing methods for the analysis of contact problems deal with the inequality constraints arising from contact conditions by means of an implicit iteration on all constraints. This paper presents a formulation for contact problems with friction for large deformations where all inequality constraints are enforced explicitly. A robust solution technique for the resulting system of nonlinear equations can then be used. This approach admits the use of line search procedures to enlarge the region of convergence.