Numerical solution of elastic bodies in contact by FEM utilising equilibrium displacement fields

In this paper a new effective formulation of the computation of the statics of elastic bodies in contact is described and demonstrated. Line contact, plane strain, and negligible friction are assumed. The formulation is an extension of the standard finite element method (FEM). With the aim to utilise the Hertz theory directly, we use the exact solution of the elastic 2-dimensional halfspace loaded by Hertzian pressure distribution and enforce the contact condition by the method of Lagrange multipliers. In numerical examples we have focussed on the demonstration and evaluation of the accuracy of the new formulation for selected applications compared with the state of the art node-to-segment contact algorithm implemented in the software system ADINA. Proposed formulation is more accurate for problems where Hertz contact dominates the strain state, especially for small number of elements, whereas we obtained a fairly good agreement with ADINA for a more general bending problem.