Discontinuous Deformation Analysis Coupling with Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods for Contact Simulations

Abstract

A novel coupling scheme is presented to combine the discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) and the interior penalty Galerkin (IPG) method for the modeling of contacts. The simultaneous equilibrium equations are assembled in a mixed strategy, where the entries are derived from both discontinuous Galerkin variational formulations and the strain energies of DDA contact springs. The contact algorithms of the DDA are generalized for element contacts, including contact detection criteria, open-close iteration, and contact submatrices. Three representative numerical examples on contact problems are conducted. Comparative investigations on the results obtained by our coupling scheme, ANSYS, and analytical theories demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.