Continuum Mechanics Modelling of Large Deformation Contact with Friction

Material forming, vehicle crash and human joints are but a few typical situations where large displacement contact mechanics plays a crucial role. Although classical computational methods combined with special constrained optimisation techniques have been successfully developed by many authors for solving such contact problems [see e.g. Kikuchi and Oden 1985], the underlying continuum mechanics formulation is lagging behind, probably due to its complexity. Most of the work is restricted to unilateral contacts without friction [Ciarlet and Necas, 1985; Ciarlet 1988; Curnier et al., 1992] and a tentative theory with friction is just emerging [Klarbring et al., 1991; Laursen and Simo, 1991, 1993; Klarbring, 1994].