Cylindrical punch with rounded edge: punch


Prepared by Philip Cardiff and Ivan Batistić


Tutorial Aims

  • Demonstrate the solver performance when solving contact problems in small deformation settings;
  • Demonstrate the process of meshing multiple bodies using the cartesianMesh utility.

Case Overview

In this example, a cylindrical punch is pressed into an elastic cylindrical foundation (Figure 1). This case is proposed as a contact mechanics benchmark by the National Agency for Finite Element Methods and Standards (NAFEMS) [1]. The material properties of the punch are similar to steel (\(E_p = 210\) GPa, \(\nu_p = 0.3\)), whereas the foundation has aluminium properties (\(E_f = 70\) GPa, \(\nu_f = 0.3\)). The punch is loaded with a uniform pressure distribution at its top surface \(p = 100\) MPa. The bottom surface of the elastic foundation is fixed. Friction is considered, and the coefficient of friction is set to \(\mu=0.1\). The problem is solved with one load increment, neglecting inertia and gravity effects. The case can be solved using an axisymmetric computational model; however, the setup herein considers a 3-D model with symmetries.

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Figure 1: Problem geometry [2, 3]

Expected Results

The resulting displacement and stress fields are expected to be axisymmetric. At the edge of the contact region, a stress peak can be expected due to the singular pressure distribution. More precisely, the cylinder fillet radius is too small to avoid having a geometric discontinuity causing a singular pressure distribution. This means peak contact pressures increase at this location with increasing mesh density; however, note that displacement fields converge to a mesh-independent solution.

Figure 2 shows the convergence of axial displacement, radial displacement, and contact pressure as the mesh is refined [2]. The solids4foam results match well with results reported in the literature [1].

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Figure 2: Radial and axial displacement predictions; contact pressure distribution [2]

Running the Case

The tutorial case is located at solids4foam/tutorials/solids/linearElasticity/punch. The case can be run using the included Allrun script, i.e. > ./Allrun. In this case, the Allrun script consists of the following steps:

  • Creating the punch mesh:
    cp system/punch_top/meshDict system/meshDict
    solids4Foam::runApplication -s punch_top cartesianMesh
    mkdir constant/punch_top
    mv constant/polyMesh constant/punch_top/
    
  • Creating the bottom mesh:
    cp system/punch_bottom/meshDict system/meshDict
    solids4Foam::runApplication -s punch_bottom cartesianMesh
    
  • Merging two meshes (this is done because cfMesh cannot make meshes for separate bodies at once):
    solids4Foam::runApplication mergeMeshes . . -addRegion punch_top -noFunctionObjects
    
  • Scaling mesh:
    transformPoints -scale "(0.001 0.001 0.001)" >& log.transformPoints
    
  • Creating patches and naming them:
    solids4Foam::runApplication autoPatch 45 -overwrite
    solids4Foam::runApplication createPatch -overwrite
    solids4Foam::runApplication splitPatch -overwrite
    
  • Creating cell zones for the punch and foundation (bottom region) so different material properties can be assigned:
    solids4Foam::runApplication setSet -batch batch.setSet
    solids4Foam::runApplication setsToZones
    
  • Running the case:

    solids4Foam::runApplication solids4Foam
    

References

[1] A. Konter, FENet (Project), and National Agency for Finite Element Methods & Standards (Great Britain), Advanced Finite Element Contact Benchmarks. NAFEMS Limited, 2006.

[2] P. Cardiff, A. Karač, P. De Jaeger, H. Jasak, J. Nagy, A. Ivanković, and Ž. Tuković, "An open-source finite volume toolbox for solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction simulations," arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.10736, 2018.

[4] I. Batistić, P. Cardiff, and Ž. Tuković, "A finite volume penalty based segment-to-segment method for frictional contact problems," Applied Mathematical Modelling, vol. 101, pp. 673–693, 2022.