The Penalty-Free Nitsche Method and Nonconforming Finite Elements for the Signorini Problem

We design and analyse a Nitsche method for contact problems. Compared to the seminal work of Chouly and Hild [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 51 (2013), pp. 1295--1307], our method is constructed by expressing the contact conditions in a nonlinear function for the displacement variable instead of the lateral forces. The contact condition is then imposed using the nonsymmetric variant of Nitsche's method that does not require a penalty term for stability. Nonconforming piecewise affine elements are considered for the bulk discretization. We prove optimal error estimates in the energy norm.