Primal and Dual Penalty Methods for Contact Problems with Geometrical Non‐linearities

The nonlinearity caused by two or more bodies in contact is often source of computational difficulties. Probably the most popular solution method is based on direct iterations with the non-penetration conditions imposed by the penalty method [1]. The method enables treatment of other non-linearities such as in the case of large displacements. In this paper we are concerned with application of a variant of the FETI domain decomposition method that enforces feasibility of Lagrange multipliers by the penalty [5]. The dual penalty method, which has been shown to be optimal for small displacements, is used in inner loop of the algorithm that treats large displacements. We give results of numerical experiments that demonstrate high efficiency of the FETI method with the dual penalty. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)