NAFEMS has published a survey on FE Analysis of contact and frictionand a booklet on how to undertake contact and friction analysis. A contact benchmarks report on two-dimensional problems was published as the first step in establishing a set of FE Contact benchmarks. It was acknowledged that although the current published NAFEMS benchmarks were limited in scope, they were important as the first step in establishing contact benchmarks.

A small “FENET Working Group on Contact” has been assembled with the collaboration of the NAFEMS CSM Working Group . Following discussions on the development of new advanced benchmarks, it was agreed to concentrate on only 5 contact benchmarks, as follows:

• 2D Contact of cylindrical roller,
• 3D Punch (Rounded edges),
• 3D Sheet metal forming,
• 3D Loaded pin,
• 3D Steel roller on rubber,

The selected contact benchmarks exhibit the following features:

• 3D contact,
• Frictional stick-slip in contact area,
• 2D/3D Linear versus quadratic elements,
• Shell contact,
• Large strain contact,
• Metal forming,
• Mesh dependency,
• Compression of rubber,
• Rolling contact,

Further Finite Element analyses were performed to establish the geometric parameters, material constants, values of the applied loads and the coefficient of friction.

The current report presents the results of the FE analyses performed on 2D and 3D approximations of the proposed problems. Since all proposed benchmarks can be reasonably well approximated with a 2D or an axisymmetric solution, all target results presented here have been obtained with a 2D or an axisymmetric FE analysis. In addition, 3D analyses have been performed and the results have been compared with the initial 2D solutions (with the exception of Contact Benchmark 1).

Frequently, reports on results of benchmark analyses present numerical solutions for selected problems, generated by different users using different Finite Element codes. Often the selection of different numerical input parameters by the analyst is not presented in the report and the analyst presents his “best choice” of the generated solutions for a particular problem.

As a result the effect of specific parameters, such as applied mesh density, element type, contact parameter settings, number of loading steps etc. is difficult to quantify and it is not clear whether obtained differences are caused by differences in the applied FE code or differences in user input. The results presented in this report not only compare results of different FE codes using as closely as possible identical input parameters, but also show the effect of variations in these parameters.

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