Solving frictional contact problems by a semismooth Newton method

This paper presents a new method for solving three-dimensional frictional contact problems. A semismooth Newton method for solving nonlinear complementarity problems is proposed based on generalized Fischer-Burmeister functions. The parametric variational principle and parametric quadratic programming method are applied to the analysis of the three-dimensional frictional contact problem. The solution of the contact problem is finally reduced to a linear complementarity problem. Then the semismooth Newton method presented is employed to solve the problem. Results of numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of the method proposed.