A 3D FEM-BEM rolling contact formulation for unstructured meshes

This work presents a new formulation for solving 3D steady-state rolling contact problems. The convective terms for computing the tangential slip velocities involved in the rolling problem, are evaluated using a new approximation inspired in numerical fluid dynamics techniques for unstructured meshes. Moreover. the elastic influence coefficients of the surface points in contact are approached by means of the finite element method (FEM) and/or the boundary element method (BEM). The contact problem is based on an Augmented Lagrangian Formulation and the use of projection functions to establish the contact restrictions. Finally, the resulting nonlinear equations set is solved using the generalized Newton method with line search (GNMls), presenting some acceleration strategies as: a new and more simplified projection operator, which makes it possible to obtain a quasi-complementarity of the contact variables, reducing the number of contact problem unknowns, and using iterative solvers. The presented methodology is validated solving some rolling contact problems and analyzed for some unstructured mesh examples. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.