The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Solution Methods for Contact Problems

Wriggers, Peter; Nour-Omid, Bahram

UCB/SESM-1984/09, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1984-07, 30 pages (500/C23/84/09)

The merits and limitations of some existing procedures for the solution of contact problems, modeled by the finite element method, are examined. Based on the Lagrangian multiplier method, a partitioning scheme can be used to obtain a small system of equation for the Lagrange multipliers which is then solved by the conjugate gradient method. A two level contact algorithm is employed which first linearizes the nonlinear contact problems to obtain a linear contact problem that is in turn solved by the Newton method. The algorithm is demonstrated on some test problems.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-84-09.pdf (2 MB)