Colloquia

Summary

When looking at machines like printers and laser cutters the point of contact of the printer head or laser head continuously changes over time. When additional material nonlinearities come into play, for example when looking at catheters, nonlinear time variant contact problems arise. Commercially available finite element packages lack methods to analyze these kinds of problems. In this research the modelling of nonlinear time variant contact problems involving beam-like structures are analyzed. An inventive method is presented which uses the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method in combination with Geometrically Exact beam theory to obtain length varying beam elements. The method is tested by means of several examples. In this presentation the theoretical background, the method used, and the corresponding results will be shown.