AN INCREMENTAL PROCEDURE FOR 3-DIMENSIONAL CONTACT PROBLEMS WITH FRICTION

An incremental procedure to deal with the three-dimensional contact pr oblem using the boundary element method is presented. The Coulomb fric tion law is used without discretizing it, which produces an additional nonlinearity due to the fact that the sliding directions are not know n. A Newton-Raphson scheme is used in each increment to determine the correct sliding direction. The load increments are associated with the linear behaviour of the solids involved in the contact whose boundari es have been replaced by triangles with constant evolution of displace ments and stresses on them. The developed procedure covers the three c lassical contact situations: advancing, receding and conforming contac t, an example belonging to each of them being analysed in this paper.