The equilibrium state of a structure subject to frictional contact

A structure in frictional contact subject to static loads has not, in general, a unique static equilibrium state. This is because the state, displacements and contact forces, depend on the load history of the structure.In cases where the exact load history is not known it would be of interest to find a state that is in some sense likely and define this as the equilibrium state. In this paper, it is assumed that the state with the smallest potential energy is the most likely one. The implication of this definition of likely state is analysed and shows that the resulting problem basically can be seen as a generalization of the frictionless contact problem to structures where no frictionless state is possible, i.e. structures where non-zero friction forces are necessary to satisfy force equilibrium.The results of several numerical experiments are given. The structures in the experiments are trusses and structures modelled by the finite element method. Both a sequential quadratic programming method and an enumeration method are used to solve the likely-state problem.