Impact between spherical rigid bodies including frictional effects

Abstract

This work presents a new contact element which allows to simulate the impact between spherical bodies assuming instantaneous local impact events by the classical Newton impact law and a rigid behaviour of the bodies. The geometrical properties of the spheres are described by a rigid body formulation with translational and rotational degrees of freedom. In addition, an extension of the non-smooth generalized α time integration scheme applied to multi-impact collisions including Coulomb’s friction is given. Six numerical examples are presented to evaluate the robustness and the performance of the proposed methodology.