Advanced interface modelling for 2D shell & 3D continuum problems

Abstract

This work is motivated by the need for an efficient yet accurate approach for static and dynamic contact analysis of large-scale structures which can a) capture the optimum con- tact position with a moderate number of contact elements, and b) enable across-partition adaptive contact analysis within a parallel processing environment. In addressing these two issues, a novel adaptive node-to-surface contact approach is proposed to discretise the contact boundaries and to trace the evolution of contact locations. Contact search is a demanding process that can become quite complicated for certain types of problem. In this work, an efficient and robust contact search method is proposed, which can a) locally track the master facet of a given slave node despite the appearance of highly non-smooth contact surface, including surfaces with concave/convex regions or with distinct boundaries as well as reversible normals, and b) globally reallocate the master-slave contact pairs based on the penetration state without an expensive global search, providing an effective adaptive contact approach. A dual-interface-based domain decomposition method emphasising across-partition con- tact coupling is proposed. A pair of fully decomposed node-to-surface contact element are proposed to discretise the across-partition contact boundaries. The assumption of small incremental displacements is adopted, which a) avoids the excessive coupling between the decomposed master and slave, b) reduces significantly the communication overhead, and c) facilitates a flexible across-partition adaptive analysis. This strategy is found to provide good results for a sufficiently small time- or load-step, and it also facilitates mix-dimensional contact simulation. Another interest in current thesis is the inaccuracy in non-smooth plates modelled us- ing 2D displacement-based shell elements. In this work the dominant factor causing the inaccuracy is recognised as the incompatible tangential rotations on the two sides of the in- tersection. A 3-noded coupling element is introduced to impose a continuous constraint to couple the incompatible rotations. The significance of the discontinuity in the shell-based folded structure and the effectiveness of the coupling element is demonstrated through numerical studies comparing shell-based models to high fidelity solid-based models.