Mortar-Type Contact-Friction Formulation for Industrial Applications Using an Augmented Lagrangian Approach Based on Ray-Tracing
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The integrity and safety of production infrastructure, especially nuclear facilities, are paramount concerns for Électricité de France (EDF). While numerical simulations are essential for forecasting structural behavior under intricate loading scenarios, contact-friction simulations continue to pose significant challenges in industrial applications. In this work, we introduce mortar-type formulations for contact-friction problems for two solids undergoing large deformations. Our approach features an augmented Lagrangian formulation adapted to a biased (master-slave) framework, inspired by the work of Poulios and Renard. Unlike conventional approaches, both the displacement field and the Lagrange multiplier are expressed in a global coordinate system. The computation of the integrals, the pairing, and field projection required within the mortar framework are performed using a ray-tracing technique. Furthermore, a penalized version of this formulation has also been derived and implemented. The entire methodology has been developed within the industrial-grade structural analysis software code aster, with a strong focus on software robustness and the validation of individual components. Indeed, the analytical derivation of tangent operators was benchmarked against finite difference approximations. Several methods for constructing skin cell pairs and numerical integration schemes have been implemented, and ongoing work is dedicated to assessing their impact on the numerical accuracy and robustness of the results.
