A Frictionless Contact Algorithm for Meshless Methods

Summary An approach to the treatment of contact problems involving frictionless sliding and separation under large deformations in meshless methods is proposed. The method is specially suited for non-structured spatial discretisation. The contact conditions are imposed using a contact potential for particles in contact. Interpenetration is checked as a part of the neighbourhood search. In the case of conventionalSPH contactconditionsare enforced on theboundarylayer2h thickwhile in the case of the normalized SPH contact conditions are enforced for the particles lying on the contact surface. The implementation of the penalty based contact algorithm for the central difference time integration scheme is described and the performance of the new contact algorithm is illustrated with an example.