Numerical strategy for solving general C1‐continuous beam‐to‐beam contact problems.

In the context of a multibody numerical environment, when aiming at representing the contact interaction between bodies one needs the inclusion of special mathematical formulations. They can be geometrically described as surface‐to‐surface or line‐to‐line contacts, for instance. The last one is usually the natural choice when addressing beam‐to‐beam contact. In the present work, a geometrically nonlinear structural formulation is combined with a beam‐to‐beam C1$$ {C}^1 $$ spline‐based contact formulation with a particular numerical strategy to address challenging contact problems. The numerical strategy consists of introducing criteria to evaluate, characterize and decide about the contact problem solutions. According to these criteria, a contact problem solution may be accepted, rejected, or proceed to a degeneration process (as a simplification of the original tentative for the geometric description). The main advantages of the proposed technique are the lack of special contact formulations for ill‐defined contact problems and the automatic switch between degenerated and nondegenerated scenarios. Therefore, one can naturally handle scenarios of pointwise or conformal contact, even in situations of transition between such categories along the model evolution. The adopted spline‐based formulation includes normal and tangential contact contributions. To test the proposed strategy, several pointwise and conformal contact examples are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]