The normal contact of rough surfaces with fine discretization

Summary The numerical treatment of a 3-d frictionless normal contact of rough bodies made of a linear–elastic, isotropic material is considered. First, the governing equations and their discretized forms are presented. Due to the order of the problem, the computation time rapidly increases with the grid refinement. Therefore, common computer programs have to be limited to 50×50 contact points. Several numerical techniques (multigrid, iterative solver, distributive relaxation) are used. Cell-centered grid transformation is applied and grid operators have been established for this purpose. In order to handle upto 1000 × 1000 cells the program CON3D has been developed.