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#### General considerations

Contact is a strongly nonlinear kind of boundary condition, preventing bodies to penetrate each other. The contact definitions implemented in CalculiX are a node-to-face penalty method and a face-to-face penalty method, both based on a pairwise interaction of surfaces. They cannot be mixed in one and the same input deck. In the present section the node-to-face penalty method is explained. For details on the penalty method the reader is referred to [75] and [40].

Each pair of interacting surfaces consists of a dependent surface and an independent surface. The dependent surface (= slave) may be defined based on nodes or element faces, the independent surface (= master) must consist of element faces (Figure 111). The element faces within one independent surface must be such, that any edge of any face has at most one neighboring face. Usually, the mesh on the dependent side should be at least as fine as on the independent side. As many pairs can be defined as needed. A contact pair is defined by the keyword card *CONTACT PAIR.

If the elements adjacent to the slave surface are quadratic elements (e.g. C3D20, C3D10 or C3D15), convergence may be slower. This especially applies to elements having quadrilateral faces in the slave surface. A uniform pressure on a quadratic (8-node) quadrilateral face leads to compressive forces in the midnodes and tensile forces in the vertex nodes [18] (with weights of 1/3 and -1/12, respectively). The tensile forces in the corner nodes usually lead to divergence if this node belongs to a node-to-face contact element. Therefore, in CalculiX the weights are modified into 24/100 and 1/100, respectively. In general, node-to-face contact is not recommended for quadratic elements. Instead, face-to-face contact should be used.

Figure 111: Definition of the dependent nodal surface and the independent element face surface

Figure 112: Creation of a node-to-face penalty contact element

In CalculiX, penalty contact is modeled by the generation of (non)linear spring elements. To this end, for each node on the dependent surface, a face on the independent surface is localized such that it contains the orthogonal projection of the node. If such is face is found a nonlinear spring element is generated consisting of the dependent node and all vertex nodes belonging to the independent face (Figure 112). Depending of the kind of face the contact spring element contains 4, 5, 7 or 9 nodes. The properties of the spring are defined by a *SURFACE INTERACTION definition, whose name must be specified on the *CONTACT PAIR card.

The user can determine how often during the calculation the pairing of the dependent nodes with the independent faces takes place. If the user specifies the parameter SMALL SLIDING on the *CONTACT PAIR card, the pairing is done once per increment. If this parameter is not selected, the pairing is checked every iteration for all iterations below 9, for iterations 9 and higher the contact elements are frozen to improve convergence. Deactivating SMALL SLIDING is useful if the sliding is particularly large.

The *SURFACE INTERACTION keyword card is very similar to the *MATERIAL card: it starts the definition of interaction properties in the same way a *MATERIAL card starts the definition of material properties. Whereas material properties are characterized by cards such as *DENSITY or *ELASTIC, interaction properties are denoted by the *SURFACE BEHAVIOR and the *FRICTION card. All cards beneath a *SURFACE INTERACTION card are interpreted as belonging to the surface interaction definition until a keyword card is encountered which is not a surface interaction description card. At that point, the surface interaction description is considered to be finished. Consequently, an interaction description is a closed block in the same way as a material description, Figure 3.

The *SURFACE BEHAVIOR card defines the linear (actually quasi bilinear as illustrated by Figure 114), exponential, or piecewice linear normal (i.e. locally perpendicular onto the master surface) behavior of the spring element. The pressure exerted on the independent face of a contact spring element with exponential behavior is given by

| (57)

Figure 113: Exponential pressure-overclosure relationship

Figure 114: Linear pressure-overclosure relationship

where is the pressure at zero clearance, is a coefficient and is the overclosure (penetration of the slave node into the master side; a negative penetration is a clearance). Instead of having to specify , which lacks an immediate physical significance, the user is expected to specify which is the clearance at which the pressure is 1 % of . From this can be calculated:

| (58)

The pressure curve for and looks like in Figure 113. A large value of leads to soft contact, i.e. large penetrations can occur, hard contact is modeled by a small value of . Hard contact leads to slower convergence than soft contact. If the distance of the slave node to the master surface exceeds no contact spring element is generated. For exponential behavior the user has to specify and underneath the *SURFACE BEHAVIOR card.

In case of a linear contact spring the pressure-overclosure relationship is given by

| (59)

were is a small number. The term in square brackets makes sure that the value of p is very small for . In general, a linear contact spring formulation will converge more easily than an exponential behavior. The pressure curve for and looks like in Figure 114. A large value of leads to hard contact. To obtain good results should typically be 5 to 50 times the E-modulus of the adjacent materials. If one knows the roughness of the contact surfaces in the form of a peak-to-valley distance and the maximum pressure to expect, one might estimate the spring constant by . The units of K are [Force]/[Length].

Notice that for a large negative overclosure a tension results (for ), equal to . The value of has to be specified by the user. A good value is about 0.25 % of the maximum expected stress in the model. CalculiX calculates from and .

For a linear contact spring the distance beyond which no contact spring element is generated is defined by if the spring area exceeds zero, and otherwise. The default for is (dimensionless) but may be changed by the user. For a linear pressure-overclosure relationship the user has to specify and underneath the *SURFACE BEHAVIOR card. is optional, and may be entered as the third value on the same line.

The pressure-overclosure behavior can also be defined as a piecewise linear function (PRESSURE-OVERCLOSURE=TABULAR). In this way the user can use experimental data to define the curve. For a tabular spring the distance beyond which no contact spring element is generated is defined by if the spring area exceeds zero, and otherwise. For tabular behavior the user has to enter pressure-overclosure pairs, one on a line.

The normal spring force is defined as the pressure multiplied by the spring area. The spring area is assigned to the slave nodes and defined by 1/4 (linear quadrilateral faces) or 1/3 (linear triangular faces) of the slave faces the slave node belongs to. For quadratic quadrilateral faces the weights are 24/100 for middle nodes and 1/100 for corner nodes. For quadratic triangular faces these weight are 1/3 and 0, respectively.

Figure 115: Shear stress versus relative tangential displacement

The tangential spring force is defined as the shear stress multiplied by the spring area. The shear stress is a function of the relative displacement between the slave node and the master face. This function is shown in Figure 115. It consists of a stick range, in which the shear stress is a linear function of the relative tangential displacement, and a slip range, for which the shear stress is a function of the local pressure only. User input consists of the friction coefficient which is dimensionless and usually takes values between 0.1 and 0.5 and the stick slope which has the dimension of force per unit of volume and should be chosen about 100 times smaller than the spring constant.

The friction can be redefined in all but the first step by the *CHANGE FRICTION keyword card. In the same way contact pairs can be activated or deactivated in all but the first step by using the *MODEL CHANGE card.

If CalculiX detects an overlap of the contacting surfaces at the start of a step, the overlap is completely taken into account at the start of the step for a dynamic calculation (*DYNAMIC or *MODAL DYNAMIC) whereas it is linearly ramped for a static calculation (*STATIC).

Finally a few useful rules if you experience convergence problems:

- Deactivate NLGEOM (i.e. do not use NLGEOM on the *STEP card). Recall, however, that NLGEOM is activated automatically if you have nonlinear material behavior.
- Try SMALL SLIDING first, and then large sliding, if applicable.
- Try a linear pressure-overclosure relationship first (instead of exponential), with a stiffness constant about 5 to 50 times Young's modulus of the adjacent materials.
- Define your slave surface based on faces, not on nodes. This can be especially helpful if you use quadratic elements.
- Make sure that the mesh density on the slave side is at least as fine as on the master side, preferably finer.
- Deactivate friction first.

Notice that the parameter CONTACT ELEMENTS on the *NODE FILE, *EL FILE, NODE OUTPUT, or *ELEMENT OUTPUT card stores the contact elements which have been generated in each iteration as a set with the name contactelements_st_in_at_it (where is the step number, the increment number, the attempt number and the iteration number) in a file ``contactelements.inp''. When opening the frd file with CalculiX GraphiX this file can be read with the command ``read contactelements.inp'' and visualized by plotting the elements in the appropriate set. These elements are the contact spring elements and connect the slave nodes with the corresponding master surfaces. In case of contact these elements will be very flat. Moving the parts apart (by a translation) will improve the visualization. Using the screen up and screen down key one can check how contact evolved during the calculation. Looking at where contact elements have been generated may help localizing the problem in case of divergence.

Notice that the number of contact elements generated is also listed in the screen output for each iteration in which contact was established anew, i.e. for each iteration if the SMALL SLIDING parameter was not used on the *CONTACT PAIR card, else only in the first iteration of each increment.

Next: Normal contact stiffness Up: Node-to-Face Penalty Contact Previous: Node-to-Face Penalty Contact Contents