A Nitsche based contact formulation for phantom node X-FEM

Modeling contact problems with sophisticated geometries is still an open subject of research in computational mechanics. In this paper phantom node X-FEM is combined with Nitsche’s formulation to model frictionless contact problems. Phantom-Node method is a variant of X-FEM which can handle complex contact interfaces and simplifies the meshing step. The normal contact constraint is applied by the Nitsche’s formulation that ensures consistency and coercivity of the finite element formulation. The robustness and accuracy of the proposed method is verified by several numerical examples.

Keywords:

Frictionless contact , Phantom node X-FEM , Nitsche’s method.