Towards large time simulation reduction for the solving of mechanical contact (large scale) problems: A robust control approach

The evolution of computational resources contributes to the use, more and more frequent, of mechanical contact in numerical models. The main difficulty is to determine rapidly the contact loads which allow balancing two structures, modeled by the finite element method. This problem is reported to be very high costly in terms of time simulation, as soon as a large number of degrees of freedom is considered. This note provides a novel approach based on robust control theory to tackle this problem that, to the best author's knowledge, has been not exploited in previous literature. The main novelty of our proposal is therefore to have put the contact problem in terms of automatic control. Besides, a promising time simulation reduction with respect to existing solutions to this problem may be achieved since, as seen in the paper, the complexity of controller is independent of the number of degree of freedom.