Hybrid FEM/HTA analysis of friction contact in elastic and elastoplastic plane stress problems

The Hopfield–Tank neural network evolutionary equations (called for short HTA – HT Analog) were modified for the analysis of friction contact interface. The modified HTA was used for modeling a function in the hybrid program FEM/HTA and applied to the analysis of two numerical examples. The first example, taken from [Mistakidis ES, Panagiotopoulos PG. Numerical treatment of the nonmonotone (zig-zag) friction and adhesive contact problems with debounding: approximation by monotone subproblems. Comput Struct 1993;(47):33–46], is related to the analysis of nonmonotone (zig-zag) contact of elastic strips. The second example concerns the tension of elastoplastic strip with a rigid bolt inserted into a circular hole of the strip. The example generalizes the analysis performed in [Pabisek E. Neural analysis of elastoplastic plane stress problem with unilateral constraints. Comput Assis Mech Eng Sci, in press], considering Coulomb’s friction contact in the bolt–hole inference.