A finite volume adaptation of beam-to-beam contact interactions implemented for geometrically exact Simo–Reissner beams

This paper presents an adaption of the finite-element based beam-to-beam contact interactions into a finite volume numerical framework. A previous work of the same authors, where a cell-centred based finite volume implementation of geometrically exact nonlinear Simo–Reissner beams was developed, is used as an underlying mathematical model. An implicit contact procedure is developed for both point-to-point and line-to-line beam frictionless contact interactions, and is implemented using the cell-centred finite volume method. To enforce the contact constraint, both penalty method and augmented-Lagrangian based techniques are used. A total of six numerical benchmark cases for point and line beam-to-beam contact interactions based on the finite element method are used to verify the numerical results, accuracy and robustness of the developed contact procedure.