Boundary Element Formulation for Contact Analysis using a Tangent Operator

This work presents a non linear formulation based on Boundary Element Method (BEM) for analysis of contact problems. BEM is known as a robust and accurate technique for this type of problems, because the contact among the corps occurs on its boundaries. This formulation is based on the dual version of BEM, in which integral equations of different types are employed along the opposite sides of the contact boundaries. The non linear behavior on the contact is considered using the Coulomb law. The non linear formulation is based on the tangent operator, which one uses the derivate of the set of equations to construct the corrections on the non linear process. This formulation has shown also accurate as the classical approach, however it is very fast in terms of computationally work. Examples are shown to illustrate the applicability of the proposed scheme.