Contact between two deformable bodies

General
1

Dear all,

I am currently working on a contact problem with friction in FEniCSx. While exploring examples and previous discussions, I noticed that many responses suggest starting with the Hertzian contact example from the FEniCS tutorial:

I have gone through this example, but it models contact using an obstacle equation rather than a physical second body. In my case, I would like to simulate contact between two deformable bodies.

Could anyone suggest resources, examples, or recommended approaches for setting up such a problem in FEniCSx?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

2

I wanted to add a small follow‑up: unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate concrete FEniCSx examples that involve two bodies in contact, with or without friction. Most examples—including the Hertzian contact demo—use an obstacle formulation or a rigid indenter, so I’m still unsure about the recommended starting point for a fully contact setup.

If anyone has already explored this, or can point to an example, a minimal research code snippet, or even just confirm the feasibility in FEniCSx, that would really help me understand how to begin structuring such a problem.

Thanks again for your time and any guidance.

3

Bilateral contact is horrendously difficult. The most advanced implementation I know of with DOLFINx is GitHub - Wells-Group/asimov-contact: Contact models for ASiMoV · GitHub.