COMPUTATIONAL CONTACT MECHANICS USING VARIATIONAL INEQUALITIES: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

Dynamic contact plays an important role in dictating the integrity, performance and safety of many engineering systems/components. Despite their importance to the mechanical integrity of the systems examined, dynamic contact effects are frequently treated using oversimplifying assumptions, which neglect the main features of the problem. The reason is that modelling dynamic contact in solids poses mathematical and computational difficulties. With the application of loads to the bodies in contact, the actual surface on which these bodies meet, change with time, and the stresses at the surfaces are generally unknown and complex to determine. In this presentation, we will develop the formulations for dynamic contact using variational inequality (VI). Three aspects of the work are examined to overcome existing contact challenges: the development of appropriate dynamic variational expressions, the implementation of these VIs using robust solution algorithms, and apply the method to real engineering problems.