Effective numerical methods for elasto-plastic contact problems with friction

Several effective numerical methods for solving the elasto-plastic contact problems with friction are presented. First, a direct substitution method is employed to impose the contact constraint conditions on condensed finite element equations, thus resulting in a reduction by half in the dimension of final governing equations. Second, an algorithm composed of contact condition probes and elasto-plastic iterations is utilized to solve the governing equation, which distinguishes two kinds of nonlinearities, and makes the solution unique. In addition, Positive-Negative Sequence Modification Method is used to condense the finite element equations of each substructure and an analytical integration is introduced to determine the elasto-plastic status after each time step or each iteration, hence the computational efficiency is enhanced to a great extent. Finally, several test and practical examples are presented showing the validity and versatility of these methods and algorithms. The Project Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China.