Wear is the progressive loss of material from the surface of a solid body when in contact with another body. The program approximates this loss of material by repositioning the contact nodes at the contacting surface. The new node locations are determined by a wear model which calculates how much and in what direction a contact node is to be moved to simulate wear based on the contact results.

This example shows how to use the Archard wear model. Since wear involves material removal, the element quality of solid elements underlying the contact elements becomes progressively worse with increasing wear. Remeshing is required to successfully simulate large amounts of wear. This example demonstrates how nonlinear mesh adaptivity can be used to improve mesh quality when a model undergoes large amounts of wear.

As an alternative to the generalized form of the Archard wear mode, you can define your own wear model via the userwear subroutine. The userwear subroutine is not covered in this example.