Abstract

Dry friction in contact interfaces can have an important impact on the dynamic response of jointed structures subjected to vibration. It may cause frettingwear leading to a modification of the contact surface geometry by producing wear debris through material removal and dissipating energy. Consequently, the contact behaviour is modified and the worn geometry induces a change in vibrations level. Therefore, it is important to be able to simulate these complex phenomena occurring at the interfaces to predict the forced response of assembled structures and also their life-expectancy to design high confidence components. A multi-scale approach is implemented considering a slow-scale for wear phenomena and a fast-scale for the non-linear dynamic response and applied to validate an experimental test.

Abstract

This paper presents a general two-scale procedure for the non-linear analysis of structures taking advantage of hybrid simulation concepts. This proposal considers the coupling and transition between elements of different scales, reducing the number of degrees of freedom in the global analysis by modeling complex phenomena in local scale models. To manage the interaction of the local models the use of the hybrid simulation platform, OpenFresco, is proposed distributing the computational work and allowing the interaction between experimental setups and numerical analysis models using different softwares. The methodology is illustrated through the solution of a linear-elastic system subjected to static and dynamic loads, comparing the behaviour and analysis time of simplified models, finite element models, and those of the the proposed procedure. Finally, to further assess and validate the methodology, the paper presents the pushover analysis of a steel frame, obtaining its capacity curve and showing the tendency of the two-scale method to the results of a refined non-linear finite element model but with a higher computational efficiency.