ON DYNAMIC MULTI-RIGID-BODY CONTACT PROBLEMS WITH COULOMB-FRICTION

This paper is a summary of a comprehensive study of the problem of pre dicting the accelerations of a set of rigid, three-dimensional bodies in contact in the presence of Coulomb friction. We begin with a brief introduction of this problem and its governing equations. This is foll owed by the introduction of complementarity formulations for the conta ct problem under two friction laws: Coulomb's Law of quadratic frictio n and an approximated pyramid law. Existence and uniqueness results So r the complementary problems are presented. Algorithms for solving the se problems are proposed and their convergence properties are discusse d. Computational results are presented and conclusions are drawn.