English

On Nitsche's method for elastic contact problems

Numerical Analysis 2020-03-05 v2 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

We show quasi-optimality and a posteriori error estimates for the frictionless contact problem between two elastic bodies with a zero-gap function. The analysis is based on interpreting Nitsche's method as a stabilised finite element method for which the error estimates can be obtained with minimal regularity assumptions and without the saturation assumption. We present three different Nitsche's mortaring techniques for the contact boundary each corresponding to a different stabilising term. Our numerical experiments show the robustness of Nitsche's method and corroborates the efficiency of the a posteriori error estimators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.09312,
  title  = {On Nitsche's method for elastic contact problems},
  author = {Tom Gustafsson and Rolf Stenberg and Juha Videman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.09312},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:50:03.530Z