Abstract
The main goal of this work is to present the surface to surface frictionless contact dynamic formulation of flexible beam to beam based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), and the region contact problem of flexible beam is simulated and analyzed. The high-order beam element of ANCF is employed to describe the warping deformation of the beam section in the contact process. Compared with ABAQUS, this modeling method only needs a small number of elements and has higher efficiency. In addition, a novel contact zone detection algorithm is proposed, which uses curved surface to describe the contact between beams, and can detect the contact state accurately when the beam diameter changes. On the other hand, the shape and position of the contact zone can be obtained using this algorithm, which has not been involved in previous studies. Next, combined with penalty method, the dynamic model of flexible beam to beam is established. Finally, three numerical examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in dealing with large zone contact problems of flexible beams.
•The surface to surface frictionless contact dynamic formulation of flexible beam to beam based on ANCF.•The warping deformation of the beam section is described using the high-order beam element of ANCF.•A novel contact zone detection approach is proposed.•The contact state is determined, and the shape and position of contact zone are calculated.•Effectiveness of the proposed methodology is compared and verified.