Subdivision schemes for smooth contact surfaces of arbitrary mesh topology in 3D

This paper presents a strategy to parameterize contact surfaces of arbitrary mesh topology in 3D with at least C1-continuity for both quadrilateral and triangular meshes. In the regular mesh domain, four quadrilaterals or six triangles meet in one node, even C2-continuity is attained. Therefore, we use subdivision surfaces, for which non-physical pressure jumps are avoided for contact interactions. They are usually present when the contact kinematics is based on facet elements discretizing the interacting bodies. The properties of subdivision surfaces give rise to basically four different implementation strategies. Each strategy has specific features and requires more or less efforts for an implementation in a finite element program. One strategy is superior with respect to the others in the sense that it does not use nodal degrees of freedom of the finite element mesh at the contact surface. Instead, it directly uses the degrees of freedom of the smooth surface. Thereby, remarkably, it does not require an interpolation. We show how the proposed method can be used to parameterize adaptively refined meshes with hanging nodes. This is essential when dealing with finite element models whose geometry is generated by means of subdivision techniques. Three numerical 3D problems demonstrate the improved accuracy, robustness and performance of the proposed method over facet-based contact surfaces. In particular, the third problem, adopted from biomechanics, shows the advantages when designing complex contact surfaces by means of subdivision techniques. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.