Dynamic contact model of shell for multibody system applications

In a multibody system consisting of shell structures, the contact may appear in any area of shells. It is difficult to simulate the contact of shells with large deformation because of the geometric nonlinearity of deformation and the boundary nonlinearity of contact. This study presents a rotation-free shell formulation and an extended contact discretization in multibody systems using a corotational frame. This model is different from previous formulations in the definition of the local frame and the processing of local large curvature. In order to deal with the shell contact, a unified contact discretization scheme including edge-to-edge contact for facet triangle shell elements is proposed to solve the large penetration problem. A series of numerical examples of multibody dynamics have validated the approach of the nonlinear shell model and contact treatments. Moreover, a practical application of deployment of solar cells shows the capability of the proposed formulation in solving large-scale problems of flexible multibody system with large deformation and contact.