Contact analysis of laminated structures including transverse shear and stretching

This work presents contact problems of laminated structures via the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). The modeling approach makes use of higher-order 1D elements accounting for transverse shear and stretching. The current work considers normal, frictionless contact based on a node-to-node formulation, and the penalty approach to enforce the contact constraints. Numerical assessments compare classical beam theories, higher-order CUF, and 3D finite element models regarding solution accuracy, computational size, and time required for the analysis. The results show the validity of Layer-Wise CUF models to capture both global and local deformations accurately, which is a shortcoming of classical beam theories, and require at least an order of magnitude fewer degrees of freedom and computational time than a full 3D finite element analysis. Particularly relevant are the accurate distributions of transverse shear stress and stretching along the thickness in the perspective of failure analyses.