An innovative treatment of frictional contact and mixed-mode debonding problems based on IGA

Nowadays computational frictional contact and fracture mechanics in the regime of large deformations is receiving an increasing attention in many field of engineering and applied science. The non-linear nature of similar problems, as well as their high sensitivity to the geometry accuracy, makes them challenging to analyze, primarily in a computational sense, when robust and stable solutions must be acquired. In such a context, we approach the non-linear contact and debonding problems by applying the isogeometric (IGA) concept based on NURBS and T-Splines interpolations. The IGA technology is here tackled from the finite element point of view, by applying the linear Bèzier operator to map the Bernstein polynomial basis on Bèzier elements to the IGA basis. Thus, the suitable isogeometric discretizations are automatically generated for any CAD geometry and incorporated into a finite element framework.