A coupled finite element-element free Galerkin approach for modeling frictional contact in engineering components

In this paper, the coupled finite element-element free Galerkin method has been employed to model and simulate the contact type nonlinearities produced by the discontinuities due the frictional contact. The domain around the contact interface has been modelled by the element free Galerkin method whereas the rest of the domain is discretised into standard finite elements. This technique exploits the advantages of both FEM and EFGM and proves to be computationally more efficient. Few modifications are made in coupled FE-EFGM in order to model and incorporate these discontinuities in the formulation. An appropriate enrichment function is applied to model the contact interface between the two bodies. The Heaviside jump function has been used to enrich the classical approximate solution to simulate the contact behaviour between the two surfaces. For the numerical integration of the weak formulation, Gaussian integration schemes have been used. Finally, some numerical problems are solved using coupled FE-EFGM and the results obtained by the proposed approach are compared with those of FEM. The results obtained by coupled FE-EFGM show a good agreement with the results obtained by conventional FEM.