Abaqus/Explicit Contact Pair Warning

[cd5486]

I have the following Warning,

***WARNING: A shell surface with shell offsets has either rigid elements or
deformable elements made rigid. Rigid surfaces with shell offsets
cannot be used with contact pairs. The shell offsets will not be
enforced within the contact domain. Please use general contact
instead.

I checked that I am not using any shell elements. I am using surface made of, SFM3D4R , which is a surface element, and has been bounded to a REF Node using *RIGID BODY. Therefore I suspect there are no thickness or offset to this element.

And I cannot find the documentation where it states that "Rigid surfaces with shell offsets cannot be used with contact pairs."

Could somebody help me to identify the cause of the above Warning.

Thanks in advance.

 

[FEA way]

Which version of Abaqus do you use ? Can’t you switch to general contact for your analysis ? In most cases, it’s advised to use it in place of contact pairs anyway.

 

[cd5486]

Thank you for your response. I am using "Abaqus 3DEXPERIENCE R2019x HotFix 18" . General Contact is giving very weird results (this I am trying to figure out). In the meantime I would like to know what could be the problem for the above Warning.

 

[NRP99]

How is the surface element defined? Did you assign any property containing thickness to this element?

Search "Assigning surface properties for contact pairs in Abaqus/Explicit" in help manual. Basically the offset thickness is cause of overclosure in contact pairs in explicit and hence recommended to use general contact.