A hybrid penalty and grid based contact method for the Material Point Method

Abstract

A frictional contact formulation for use with the Material Point Method (MPM) is presented in which the initial geometry description is retained and evolved. By doing so, this formulation is able to resolve contacts, particularly those involving small deformations, at a scale much smaller than the resolution of the computational grid. A detailed description of the contact algorithm will be presented, as will example calculations that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.