Uzawa block relaxation method for the unilateral contact problem

We present a Uzawa block relaxation method for the numerical resolution of contact problems with or without friction, between elastic solids in small deformations. We introduce auxiliary unknowns to separate the linear elasticity subproblem from the unilateral contact and friction conditions. Applying a Uzawa block relaxation method to the corresponding augmented Lagrangian functional yields a two-step iterative method with a linear elasticity problem as a main subproblem while auxiliary unknowns are computed explicitly. Numerical experiments show that the method are robust and scalable with a significant saving of computational time. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.