Three-dimensional third medium contact model for hyperelastic contact and pneumatically actuated systems

Abstract: This work presents a comprehensive three-dimensional third-medium contact framework for modeling complex contact interactions in hyperelastic solids and pneumatically actuated systems. The proposed third-medium formulation embeds a fictitious medium (or third medium) between potentially interacting bodies, enabling a unified and robust treatment of hyperelastic contact and self-contact without the need for discretization of the contact interface. Unlike the widely studied two-dimensional problem, this paper extends the new regularization term given in Reference \cite{TMCWriggers2} to three-dimensional problems and ensures element quality in a third medium. Due to the need for higher-order elements for the regularization term, this paper details the linearization process of this problem within the finite element framework. In addition, pneumatically actuated systems are considered by introducing a pneumatic term to represent pneumatic loading (pressure or suction) and inducing contact caused by internal inflation. This approach is suitable for complex hyperelastic contact and self-contact, and has potential applications in the fields of soft robotics and flexible mechanisms. The framework is developed in a fully three-dimensional setting, making it also suitable for isogeometric methods and meshless methods. Several benchmark and application-level simulations demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and versatility of the proposed approach. The results highlight the capability of the three-dimensional third-medium model to handle challenging nonlinear contact scenarios relevant to soft materials, soft actuators, and emerging multifunctional structures.