Thermomechanical contact analyses of composite laminates based on domain/boundary decomposition method

This paper shows that a domain/boundary decomposition method is effective for thermomechanical contact analyses of composite laminates. Here, the domain/boundary decomposition implies that the whole domain of the composite laminate is decomposed independently into subdomains, an interface, and contact interlaces. The penalty-based variational formulations are then performed to combine the interface or contact interfaces with the neighboring subdomains that satisfy continuity constraints on the displacement and temperature fields. Consequently, the iterative finite element computations due to the non-linear contact boundaries can be localized within a few subdomains and/or contact interfaces. Therefore, the computational efficiency can be improved considerably by setting up suitable solution algorithms. In order to compare the computational efficiency quantitatively, the total numbers of floatingpoint operations are estimated for all the solution algorithms. Through a set of numerical experiments, it is confirmed that the computational efficiency is highly increased and the solution accuracy does not deteriorate by decomposing the whole domain and contact boundaries.