Meshless shape design sensitivity analysis and optimization for contact problem with friction

In this paper, a continuum-based shape design sensitivity formulation for a frictional contact problem with a rigid body is proposed using a meshless method. The contact condition is imposed using the penalty method that regularizes the solution of variational inequality. The shape dependency of the contact variational form with respect to the design velocity field is obtained. The dependency of the response with respect to the shape of the rigid body is also considered. It is shown that the sensitivity equation needs to be solved at the final converged load step for the frictionless contact problem, whereas for the frictional contact case the sensitivity solution is needed at the converged configuration of each load step because the sensitivity of the current load step depends on that of the previous load step. The continuum-based contact formulation and consistent linearization is critical for accurate shape design sensitivity results. The accuracy of the proposed method is compared with the finite difference result and excellent agreement is obtained for a door seal contact example. A design optimization problem is formulated and solved to reduce the contact gap opening successfully in a demonstration of the proposed method.