A frictionless contact formulation for spatial rods is developed within the framework of isogeometric collocation. The structural mechanics is described by the Cosserat theory of geometrically nonlinear spatial rods. The numerical discretization is based on an isogeometric collocation method, where the geometry and solution fields are represented as NURBS curves and the strong forms of the equilibrium equations are collocated at Greville points. In this framework, a frictionless rod-to-rod contact formulation is proposed. Contact points are detected by a coarse-level and a refined search for close centerline points and reaction forces are computed by the actual penetration of rod surface points, so that the enforcement of the contact constraints is performed with the penalty method. An important aspect is the application of contact penalty forces as point loads within the collocation scheme, and methods for this purpose are proposed and evaluated. The overall contact algorithm is validated by and applied to several numerical examples.

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Keywords: Isogeometric analysis, Collocation method, Contact formulation, Nonlinear rods