Decomposing the Contact Linear Complementarity Problem into Separate Contact Regions

Abstract

We present a novel approach to handling frictional contacts for deformable body simulations. Our contact model allows to separate the contact area into a set of detached contact regions. For each of them a separate mixed linear complementarity problem (MLCP) is formulated. Parallel processing of these independent contact regions may considerably improve the performance of the contact handling routine. Moreover, the proposed contact model results in sparse matrix formulation of the corresponding MLCP in the individual contact regions. For solving the MLCPs we propose an iterative method which combines the projected conjugate gradient approach and the projected Gauss-Seidel method.