Rigid contact modelled by CAD surface

The present paper deals with the problem of large displacement frictionless contact between a rigid obstacle and an elastic body. In Klarbring a formulation of this problem which makes use of a distance function G is given, and in Bjorkman the related computational scheme is presented. We give in this introduction a summary of these works, which shows the central position in the computational scheme of the function G, its gradient ΔG and its Hessian Δ2G. In the next section we present a particular distance function that is useful when, in the computational realization, the rigid obstacle is a CAD surface with continuous curvature. As an example of such a surface, we briefly present the conceptual ideas of Ferguson bicubic spline surfaces. Then a search algorithm needed for determination of the value of G during iterations is given. Finally, we present some test examples.