Simulation of Adhesive Frictional Contact of Soft Materials by Bi-Potential Method

Abstract

We propose a numerical formulation for the simulation of frictional contact with interfacial adhesion between soft bodies. In this work, the adhesive interface behaviour derives from a free surface energy and a pseudo-potential of the surface dissipation, which describe both the de-bonding process of the adhesive links due to tangential and normal interface deformation. Subsequently, a complete contact and friction law with the account for interface adhesion is formulated. Then the local contact nonlinear equations are solved using a Newton-like algorithm within the bi-potential framework. Numerical examples are performed to demonstrate the capacity of the proposed approach.