Abstract
Due to the fact that in contact problems the contact area is not known a priori, a sufficient discretization to obtain a convergent finite element solution cannot be supplied from the outset. Therefore it is necessary to use adaptive finite element methods to adjust automatically the mesh sizes not only in the bodies under consideration but also in the contact zone. In this paper we develop an adaptive method for geometrically linear contact problems, which also includes elastoplastic material behavior. The radial return algorithm is used to derive the error estimator for one time increment of the solution process. The error estimator is based on the Zienkiewicz-Zhu projection scheme, which is extended to account for the special situation in the contact interface.
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Communicated by S. N. Atluri, 18 August 1995
In memoriam of J. C. Simo
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Wriggers, P., Scherf, O. An adaptive finite element algorithm for contact problems in plasticity. Computational Mechanics 17, 88–97 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00356481
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00356481