Consistent treatment of boundaries with mortar contact formulations using dual Lagrange multipliers

Computational modelling of contact problems raises two basic questions: Which method should be used to enforce the contact conditions and how should this method be discretised? The most popular enforcement methods are the Lagrange multiplier method, the penalty method and combinations of these two. A frequently used discretisation method is the so called node-to-segment approach. However, this approach might lead to problems like jumps in contact forces, loss of convergence or failure to pass the patch test. Thus in the last few years, several segment-to-segment contact algorithms based on the mortar method were proposed. Combination of a mortar discretisation with a penalty based enforcement of the contact conditions leads to unphysical penetrations. On the other hand, a Lagrange multiplier mortar method requires additional unknowns. Hence, condensation of the Lagrange multipliers is desirable to preserve the initial size of the system of equations. This can be achieved by interpolating the Lagrange multipliers with so-called dual shape functions. Discretising two contacting bodies leads to opposed contact surface representations of finite element edges, called slave and master elements, respectively. In current versions of dual Lagrange multiplier mortar formulations an inconsistency at the boundary appears when only a part of a slave element (instead of the entire element) belongs to the contact area. We present a modified definition of the dual shape functions in such slave elements. The basic idea is to construct dual shape functions that fulfill the so-called biorthogonality condition within the contact area. This leads to consistent mortar matrices also in the boundary region. To avoid ill-conditioning of the stiffness matrix, the modified mortar matrices are weighted with appropriate weighting factors. In doing so, the corresponding modified Lagrange multiplier nodal values are of the same order as the unmodified ones. Various examples demonstrate the performance of the modified mortar contact algorithm. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.