A segmentation-free isogeometric extended mortar contact method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a segmentation-free isogeometric mortar contact method that accurately captures pressure discontinuities without the need for segmentation, simplifying computations and maintaining high accuracy in contact simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel extended finite element approach with a two-half-pass algorithm eliminating the need for segmentation in mortar contact methods.

Findings

Passes contact patch test without segmentation

Demonstrates robustness and accuracy in numerical examples

Reduces computational complexity in contact simulations

Abstract

This paper presents a new isogeometric mortar contact formulation based on an extended finite element interpolation to capture physical pressure discontinuities at the contact boundary. The so called two-half-pass algorithm is employed, which leads to an unbiased formulation and, when applied to the mortar setting, has the additional advantage that the mortar coupling term is no longer present in the contact forces. As a result, the computationally expensive segmentation at overlapping master-slave element boundaries, usually required in mortar methods (although often simplified with loss of accuracy), is not needed from the outset. For the numerical integration of general contact problems, the so-called refined boundary quadrature is employed, which is based on adaptive partitioning of contact elements along the contact boundary. The contact patch test shows that the proposed formulation passes the test without using either segmentation or refined boundary quadrature. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed formulation.