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Spline-Based Contact: Algorithms And Applications, Pulama Bhattacharya

Theses and Dissertations

Contact is one of the most challenging nonlinearities to solve in solid mechanics. In traditional linear finite element analysis, the contact surface is only C^0 continuous, as a result, the normal to the contact surface is not continuous. The normal contact force is directed along the normal in the direction of the contact surface, and therefore, the contact force is discontinuous. This issue is tackled in linear finite element analysis using various surface smoothing techniques, however, a better solution is to use isogeometric analysis where the solution space is spanned by smooth spline basis functions. Unfortunately, spline-based isogeometric contact analysis …