A numerical investigation on Contact Mechanics applications using eight-node hexahedral elements with underintegration techniques

Abstract In the present work the performance of finite element formulations with different reduced integration strategies is evaluated for Contact Mechanics applications. One-point quadrature and selective reduced integration are utilized here using hourglass control to suppress volumetric and shear locking for materials with incompressible plastic behavior and bending-dominated problems. A corotational formulation is adopted to deal with physically and geometrically nonlinear analysis and the generalized-α method is employed for time integration in the nonlinear dynamic range. The contact formulation is based on the penalty method, where the classical Coulomb’s law is used considering a convected coordinate system for three-dimensional friction with large deformation and finite sliding. Contact problems involving deformable and rigid bodies, as well as static and dynamic analysis, are investigated and results are analyzed considering the different underintegration formulations proposed here.