An a posteriori error indicator for Coulomb’s frictional contact

In this paper, we present a new error indicator for the frictional contact problem governed by Coulomb’s law. This indicator is built over the combination of two known methods. The first concerns the error obtained from the projection techniques where super convergence properties are used for smoothing the finite element stress fields. The second method takes into account the errors in the constitutive relation of the contact zones. By using both the error indicator and procedures of mesh adaptivities, we show examples of optimised computations.