3-DIMENSIONAL FRICTIONAL CONTACT ANALYSIS USING THE HOMOTOPY METHOD

Abstract

A three-dimensional contact problem with the orthotropic Coulomb friction is formulated in the form of a system of nonlinear equations. The nonlinear complementarity formulation derived naturally from the three-dimensional frictional contact phenomenon is used in the numerical analysis without such linearization as previously introduced. The probability-one homotopy method known as a globally convergent zero-finding algorithm is implemented as an exact method and applied to each incremental step. The method is illustrated by two three-dimensional problems and the results are compared with those of commercial package and other approximations.