A mortar method combined with an augmented Lagrangian approach for treatment of mechanical contact problems

Abstract

This work presents a mixed penalty-duality formulation from an augmented Lagrangian approach for treating the contact inequality constraints. The augmented Lagrangian approach allows to regularize the non differentiable contact terms and gives a C1 differentiable saddle-point functional. The relative displacement of two contacting bodies is described in the framework of the Finite Element Method (FEM) using the mortar method, which gives a smooth representation of the contact forces across the bodies interface. To study the robustness and performance of the proposed algorithm, validation numerical examples with finite deformations and large slip motion are presented.