2009 Volume 3 Issue 1 Pages 54-65
In this paper, a simple solution scheme for frictionless contact problems of linear elastic bodies is proposed. The proposed method is a variant of the semismooth Newton method. The frictionless contact problem, which is discretized using the finite element method with lower-order elements and a node-to-node contact model, is considered, although the proposed method can be extended to a node-to-segment or segment-to-segment contact model. The present method can be implemented by slightly modifying a computer program for the semismooth Newton method. In the iterative loop of the proposed method, a symmetric linear structural problem with multi-point constraints is solved. Therefore, the proposed method can be applied to large-scale contact problems. Good convergence of the proposed method compared to the semismooth Newton method is demonstrated in some examples.