Automatic contact detection between rope fibers

Abstract

Abstract Understanding and modeling contact behavior of rope-like structures imposed by pure torsion represents a very difficult topic among the non-smooth mechanical problems. Apart from the high non-linearities on the boundary conditions, the location of real contact areas between inter fibers becomes a prerequisite difficulty. In this paper, a new three-stages contact searching algorithm based on bounding volume hierarchies and orthogonal projections is developed for fiber contact problems involving large deformation. In particular, an improved axis aligned bounding boxes hierarchy based on the specific geometry component is proposed, which can directly result in vertex-element pairs. The frictional contact forces are solved in a reduced system within the bi-potential framework. The algorithms are implemented into the in-house finite element software FER/Impact and some numerical examples are carried out to illustrate the proposed methods.