A NOTE ON THE TREATMENT OF FRICTIONLESS CONTACT BETWEEN NONSMOOTH SURFACES IN FULLY NONLINEAR PROBLEMS

An approach is presented for the formulation of the unilateral contact constraint in the presence of contact surface discontinuities. Such d iscontinuities may be due to physical corners on the surfaces of conta cting bodies, or may be introduced by a discretization process (e.g. f inite elements). It is asserted that a strong analogy exists between t his problem and the one describing inelastic evolution in the presence of a discontinuous yield surface. This analogy is exploited to produc e an effective treatment of the frictionless corner problem, complete with an effective augmented Lagrangian implementation for accurate con straint enforcement.