A mortar formulation for frictionless line-to-line beam contact

Abstract This paper describes the quasi-static formulation of frictionless line contact between flexible beams by employing mortar finite element approach. Contact constraints are enforced in a weak sense along region using Lagrange multipliers. A simple projection appropriate for thin with circular cross-sections is proposed computation regions. It combined geometrically exact beam formalism on Lie group $SE(3)$ S E ( 3 ) . Interestingly, this framework leads to constraint gradient and tangent stiffness invariant under rigid body transformations. The tested some numerical examples.