• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.439-444
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• 2009

This paper presents an efficient contact detection algorithm for the plane elastostatic contact problem of the boundary element method(BEM). The data structures of the boundary element method are dissected to develop an efficient contact detection algorithm. This algorithm is consists of three parts as global searching, local searching and contact relation setting to reflect the corner node problem. Contact master and slave type elements are used in global searching step and quad-tree is selected as the spatial decomposition method in local searching step. To set up contact relation equations, global contact searching is conducted at node level and local searching is performed at element level. To verify the efficiency of the proposed contact detection algorithm of BEM, numerical example is presented.