A cover-based contact detection approach for irregular convex polygons in discontinuous deformation analysis

authored by
Xiaoying Zhuang, Fei Zheng, Hong Zheng, Yu-Yong Jiao, Timon Rabczuk, Peter Wriggers
Abstract

Irregular polygon shapes (eg, with small edges or small angles) are usually encountered in the contact simulation of discrete block systems. Treatment of irregular polygons in contact detection process has critical effects on the robustness and efficiency of the discontinuous computation approach. The present work proposes a cover-based strategy to detect and solve contacts of irregular convex polygons in a robust and efficient way. Contact constraints of two polygons are represented by vertex-edge and edge-vertex contact covers in 2D. Two loops, namely vertex-edge loop and edge-vertex loop, and two filter criteria, namely the entrance filter criterion and the distance filter criterion, are used to establish the potential contact cover list of two neighbor polygons. The initial active and closed contact covers are chosen based on block configuration at the beginning of the step and they are then updated in the open-close iteration process using proposed criteria. This strategy is implemented in discontinuous deformation analysis. The robustness of the proposed cover-based approach and the conventional type-based approach in handling contact of irregular blocks is verified first. Then, the contact analysis efficiency of the cover-based approach with different contact tolerances is evaluated. This cover-based method can be extended to 3D case for efficient and robust contact analysis of irregular polyhedral blocks.

Organisation(s)
Institute of Photonics
Institute of Continuum Mechanics
External Organisation(s)
Tongji University
Beijing University of Technology
China University of Geosciences
Ton Duc Thang University
Type
Article
Journal
International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics
Volume
45
Pages
208-233
No. of pages
26
ISSN
0363-9061
Publication date
05.01.2021
Publication status
Published
Peer reviewed
Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Computational Mechanics, Materials Science(all), Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology, Mechanics of Materials
Electronic version(s)
https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3157 (Access: Open)
 

Details in the research portal "Research@Leibniz University"