Abstract
This paper focuses on the Application of mortar-based isogeometric analysis to predict contact between Subsea pipelines and trawl gear. The contact constraints are satisfied exactly with the augmented Lagrangian method, and treated with a mortar-based approach combined with a simplified integration method to avoid segmentation of the contact surfaces. The spatial discretization of the deformable body is performed with NURBS and C0- continuous Lagrange polynomial elements. The numerical examples demonstrate that isogeometric surface discretization delivers more accurate and robust predictions of the response compared to Lagrange discretizations.