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Theory of Rigid Body Contact
The Rigid Body Contact is used to model structural contact between rigid bodies. It is used to model contact between a spherical (3D) or circular (2D) rigid body, and a destination selection defined on spherical (3D) or circular (2D) rigid bodies, or on any arbitrary shaped rigid or elastic bodies.
A penalty method is used to calculate the contact force between the source and destination. The penalty factor defines the stiffness of a spring inserted between the source and destination boundaries.
Depending on the shape of the destination, two types of formulations are available in Rigid Body Contact. They are:
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Spherical to Spherical Formulation.
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Spherical to Arbitrary Formulation.
The formulation is the same in 2D, except that all spherical shaped bodies are replaced by circular shaped bodies.