Dear CalculiX users,
in version 2.17 I got Mortar contact to work again. There are still examples showing problems, however, in the majority of cases it works. Mortar contact is more stable than surface-to-surface penalty contact and also allows for perfectly hard contact. Right now, it can only be used in *static calculations.
The drawback of Mortar is that it gets into trouble if too may SPC’s or MPC’s are defined. Since 1D (beams) and 2D (shells…) elements are expanded in CalculiX and quite a few SPC’s and MPC’s are defined doing this, Mortar can only be used for truly 3D elements, e.g. tetrahedral and hexahedral elements.
For examples look for the paramter MORTAR in the test input decks.
Best Greetings,
Guido