A local contact detection technique for very large contact and self contact problems : sequential and parallel implementations

Abstract : The local contact detection step can be very time consuming for large contact problems reaching the order of time required for their resolution. At the same time, even the most time consuming technique all-to-all does not guarantee the correct establishment of contact elements needed for further contact problem resolution. Nowadays the limits on mesh size in the Finite Element Analysis are largely extended by powerful parallelization methods and affordable parallel computers. In the light of such changes an improvement of existing contact detection techniques is necessary. The aim of our contribution is to elaborate a very general, simple and fast method for sequential and parallel detection for contact problems with known a priori and unknown master-slave discretizations. In the proposed method the strong connections between the FE mesh, the maximal detection distance and the optimal dimension of detection cells are established. Two approaches to parallel treatment of contact problems are developed and compared: SDMR/MDMR - Single/Multiple Detection, Multiple Resolution. Both approaches have been successfully applied to very large contact problems with more than 2 million nodes in contact.