Tribological Complexity in Interface Constitutive Models

Abstract

With the developments of the past four chapters in hand, we have assembled a fairly comprehensive framework for the modeling of contact and impact phenomena in nonlinear finite element analysis. This framework includes an overview of the formulation and numerical solution of generic initial/boundary value problems in nonlinear solid mechanics (Chapter 2); a presentation of the overall problem structure of contact problems, within both variational and constrained optimization frameworks (Chapter 3); a review of the issues necessary to properly formulate kinematically nonlinear contact problems from a continuum mechanical point of view (Chapter 4); and a comprehensive specification of spatial and temporal discretization strategies for contact/impact, enabling a range of numerical solutions to be obtained in both quasistatic and dynamic problems (Chapter 5). The techniques and concepts discussed in these four chapters provide key concepts for understanding of the vast majority of computational contact strategies in prevalent use today. However, even with this basic knowledge of contact formulations in place, a number of issues remain sufficiently vexing so as to warrant considerable current and future attention by computational researchers. Accordingly, the final three chapters of this monograph provide insight into some of the more significant current issues in computational contact mechanics.