A NOTE ON THE TREATMENT OF FRICTIONLESS CONTACT BETWEEN NONSMOOTH SURFACES IN FULLY NONLINEAR PROBLEMS

An approach is presented for the formulation of the unilateral contact constraint in the presence of contact surface discontinuities. Such discontinuities may be due to physical corners on the surfaces of contacting bodies, or may be introduced by a discretization process (e.g. finite elements). It is asserted that a strong analogy exists between this problem and the one describing inelastic evolution in the presence of a discontinuous yield surface. This analogy is exploited to produce an effective treatment of the frictionless corner problem, complete with an effective augmented Lagrangian implementation for accurate constraint enforcement.