The Local Average Contact (LAC) method

The Local Average Contact (LAC) method allows the handling of nonmatching meshes in an easy way by averaging locally the interpenetration between the contacting bodies. In this paper we consider the frictionless unilateral contact problem and several numerical experiments involving two and three-dimensional bodies discretized with various linear and quadratic finite elements. We also present a convergence analysis of the method in the geometrical nonconforming case in which the boundary points of the candidate contact areas do not coincide.