Simulation of impacts between spherical rigid bodies with frictional effects

This work studies the impact between spherical rigid bodies in the frame of nonsmooth contact dynamics considering friction effects. A new impact element formulation based on the classical instantaneous local Newton impact law is presented. The kinematics properties of the spheres are described by a rigid body formulation with translational and rotational degrees of freedom referred to an inertial frame. In addition, an extension of the nonsmooth generalized-alpha$$ \alpha $$ time integration scheme applied to collisions with multiple impacts including Coulomb's friction law is given. Six numerical examples are presented to evaluate the robustness and the performance of the proposed methodology.