An Improved Contact Formulation for Impact Crack Simulations in a Laminated Glass Beam

Laminated glass is a simple sandwiched structure, which, however, is widely used in automotive and architectural industries. The well-known extrinsic cohesive zone model has proved to be a powerful numerical approach for the glass-ply crack simulations in laminated glass, where the classical node-to-segment contact treatment is usually employed. However, an unphysical phenomenon, named contact force jump, may arise during crack simulations, thereby resulting in numerical instabilities or incorrect simulation results. To address this issue, we develop an improved node-to-segment contact formulation to make the contact interactions in extrinsic crack simulations more stable. The main idea is to keep the number of contact constraints constant before and after cracking. The improved contact formulation is very simple and easy to implement, which, however, is effective to address the unphysical phenomenon. Three numerical examples, including the impact crack simulations of a laminated glass beam, are performed to validate the accuracy and effectiveness of the improved contact, formulation.