Multibody Simulation

Problems involving contact between deformable bodies are of great importance in mechanical and civil engineering as well as in medicine, food processing, pharmaceuticals, and domestic industries. Implicit solution of large-strain, multibody contact systems is one of the most demanding problems in computational mechanics. Complex contact formulations, including various types of smoothing, frictional laws, and sensitivity analysis, have become progressively computationally expensive, and for even moderate-size problems can be a bottleneck.

Abstract description and symbolical generation of numerical code have opened new ways for coding contact element routines. This example uses the classical master-slave approach, with contact smoothing applied to improve accuracy and numerical efficiency. The augmented Lagrangian treatment of contact and friction inequality constraints leads to the full Newton-method solution of the saddle-point problem in one and two variables.

The animation is provided by Jakub Lengiewicz, Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Warsaw, Poland.