FE analysis of frictional contact effect for laying wire rope

Contact model formulated with variational equalities, has been presented for laying wire rope in this paper. For the contact searching procedure, the splitting-pinball algorithm from which the user can be spared from guessing the types of contact that may occur, have been described. Taking the friction contact into account, the Augmented Lagrangian method has been applied to calculate the contact force. FE simulation of a simple wire strand has been given. And the effects of friction coefficient and self-rotating ratio on the contact stress and on the forming stress and strain have been analyzed. Also the stability, efficiency and precision of the numerical simulation are discussed. For the residual stress of helical wire in the end of laying process, the computed results with nonzero friction coefficient are in better agreement with the experimental results than those without friction.