Pseudo-interference stiffness estimation, a highly efficient numerical method for force evaluation in contact problems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method, Pseudo-Interference Stiffness Estimation (PISE), for evaluating the contact compliance and the contact load in the contacting elastic solids. The PISE method is based on the evaluation of the geometric overlap of two assumedly rigid bodies and estimation of the contact force based on this artificial overlap area (or volume). In this paper, an example of the dynamic simulation of two disk collision problem is solved both by PISE method and finite element contact model. The contact force and velocity changes during impact from both methods are shown to be in good agreement. However, PISE method is, computationally, orders of magnitude (about 3000 times in our numerical simulations) faster than finite element contact analysis. The proposed method will be of practical use in contact force approximation of contacting bodies, such as meshing of spur gear teeth, cam analysis and synthesis, robotic grabbing, and numerous other applications.