A robust and efficient adaptive NURBS contact enrichment technique

Abstract

A new contact enrichment technique is proposed to improve accuracy and efficiency in contact simulations. While traditional finite element analysis (FEA) is commonly used, it can lead to geometric approximation errors and become computationally expensive when high accuracy is required, especially in contact problems. Isogeometric analysis (IGA) addresses these issues by providing exact geometric representation and smoother solution fields using spline-based basis functions, such as non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). Most existing NURBS-based contact enrichment techniques apply uniform refinement across the entire contact surface, regardless of the evolving nature of the actual contact zone under external loading. The proposed adaptive NURBS contact enrichment technique addresses this limitation by adaptively refining only the actual contact zone, based on real-time contact surface detection. This targeted refinement significantly improves the accuracy of the contact results while reducing unnecessary computations. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves higher accuracy and efficiency than standard uniform contact enrichment techniques. Even lower-order adaptively enriched contact elements outperform higher-order uniformly enriched contact elements, with further improvements observed when using higher-order adaptively enriched contact elements.