Inference of Substructured Reduced-Order Models for Dynamic Contact from Contact-free Simulations

In this paper, we propose an operator-inference-based reduction approach for contact problems, leveraging snapshots from simulations without active contact. Contact problems are solved using adjoint methods, by switching to the dual system, where the corresponding Lagrange multipliers represent the contact pressure. The Craig-Bampton-like substructuring method is incorporated into the inference process to provide the reduced system matrices and the coupling of the contact and interior nodes. The maximum possible set of contact nodes must be known a priori. Characteristic properties of the inferred matrices, such as symmetry and positive definiteness, are enforced by appending additional constraints to the underlying least-squares problem. The resulting dual system, which forms a linear complementarity problem, is well-defined and can be effectively solved using methods such as Lemke's algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is validated on three-dimensional finite element models.