I think that abaqus does have a plain stress formulation (3 X 3 matrix) but includes a through thickness strain term to account for thickness reduction due to poisson effects:
e3 = (-V13/E11)S1 - (V23/E22)S2
Hi Calmitude,
I am also a new ABAQUS user and am curious why the pre.exe takes so long. I think it is because the input file can contain commands like "*NFILL" so the nodes are not defined in the input file and need to be generated by the pre.exe executable. I would be very interested if this...