Modeling of contact interfaces by penalty based enriched finite element method

The present study investigates the frictional contact behavior in engineering materials containing different types of discontinuities or features in the domain by employing the extended finite element method (XFEM). This method is a strong and efficient numerical tool for modeling different types of discontinuities occurring in the domain. The technique models the contact interfaces and other material irregularities independent of the grid or mesh due to which the problems of conformal meshing, remeshing and mesh adaption do not arise. The interface between two contacting bodies is identified by employing the level set method. The Heaviside jump function and level set method are employed to develop local enrichment for contact surfaces. Non-penetration conditions and contact constraints are imposed using the penalty based approach. Split elements are partitioned with triangular sub-elements having higher order Gauss quadrature for the integration over the domain. Finally, several numerical problems are presented to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency and potential of XFEM in modeling frictional contact between solid bodies with different geometries of contact interfaces. The current work employs XFEM to model circular, elliptical, rectangular and hexagonal contact interface between two solid bodies.