This paper presents a new mathematical model for the highly nonlinear problem of frictional contact. A programming model, multipole boundary element method (BEM), was developed for 3-D elastic contact with friction to replace the Monte Carlo method. A numerical example shows that the optimization programming model for the point-to-surface contact with friction and the fast optimization generalized minimal residual algorithm (GMRES(m)) significantly improve the analysis of such problems relative to the conventional BEM.

The analysis of 3-D elasto-plastic contact with friction is a highly nonlinear problem. The elements in the contact and plastic zones should be refined to obtain accurate information about the real size, displacement, and traction in the contact zone. However, the increase in the number of degrees of freedom is limited when traditional boundary element method (BEM) is used with the larger memory size and long CPU time required for the solution procedure. This paper describes the additional mathematical friction model to the 3-D elastic multipole BEM to develop a 3-D elasto-plastic contact multipole BEM. Numerical tests show that with this new method, the needed computer memory size is only 2% of the traditional BEM model with friction, which erases large-scale computing with refined meshes and improves the computational accuracy.