On a computational approach to multiple contacts / impacts of elastic bodies

The analysis of dynamic contacts/impacts of several deformable bodies belongs to both theoretically and computationally complicated problems, because of the presence of unpleasant nonlinearities and of the need of effective contact detection. This paper sketches how such difficulties can be overcome, at least for a model problem with several elastic bodies, using i) the explicit time-discretization scheme and ii) the finite element technique adopted to contact evaluations together with iii) the distributed computing platform. These considerations are supported by the references to useful generalizations, motivated by significant engineering applications. Illustrative examples demonstrate this approach on structures assembled from a finite number of shells.