Improved stabilization technique for frictional contact problems solved with hp-BEM

Abstract

We improve the residual based stabilization technique for Signorini contact problems with Tresca friction in linear elasticity solved with hp-mixed BEM which has been recently analyzed by Banz et al. in Numer. Math. 135 (2017) pp. 217-263. The stabilization allows us to circumvent the discrete inf-sup condition and thus the primal and dual sets can be discretized independently. Compared to the above mentioned paper we are able to remove the dependency of the scaling parameter on the unknown Sobolev regularity of the exact solution and can thus also improve the convergence rate in the a priori error estimate. The second improvement is a rigorous a priori and a posteriori error analysis when the boundary integral operators in the stabilization term are approximated. The latter is of fundamental importance to keep the computational time small. We present numerical results in two and three dimensions to underline our theoretical findings, show the superiority of the hp-adaptive stabilized mixed scheme and the effect induced by approximating the stabilization term. Moreover, we show the applicability of the proposed method to the Coulomb frictional case for which we extend the a posteriori error analysis.