Applying displacement/strain field as boundary condition in ABAQUS

[AeroEng31]

Hello everyone!

How can I apply displacement or, alternatively, strain fields to a model in ABAQUS? As in a field that has the displacement/strain value at each point in the domain. I understand that mapped (tabular) analytical fields are not usable for displacement BCs.

I saw a similar topic in thread1630-513003, but it did not seem very conclusive...

I would be really thankful if anyone could guide me on this.

Thanks in advance!

 

[FEA way]

Analytical fields in Abaqus/CAE are divided into expression and mapped fields. Only the former (spatial variation defined as a simple expression based on the coordinates) can be used for displacement BCs. Discrete fields are also supported for that but there you just define a value per node and DOF.

Strain can be applied directly only as an initial plastic strain.

 

[AeroEng31]

Hi! Thank you very much for your feedback.

So it seems that the tools ABAQUS provides will probably not suffice for my objective, which is to apply a displacement/strain field defined point-by-point on a surface of the part.

Do you happen to know any alternatives that I can explore to do that? In the thread I mentioned (thread1630-513003), the user referred submitting the displacement field as an input file to be read with the model .inp file...

Thanks!

 

[FEA way]

the user referred submitting the displacement field as an input file to be read with the model .inp file...

This is just about exporting the displacement results per node and DOF and then turning them into *BOUNDARY entries. So pretty much the same as what you can do with discrete fields. If your data is defined per point with given coordinates, not per node number, you will have to interpolate it to mesh nodes with some script since there are no built-in tools for that.

Of course, you also have to keep in mind that this will work like all boundary conditions work - displacements in certain degrees of freedom will be enforced in the nodes and they won't be allowed to move freely in those directions. So it's not the same as an initial condition (e.g. initial plastic strain) would be.

 

[Zhanglangeba]

Hi, have you solved this problem yet? I have the same problem, I want to use ODB mesh data as a displacement boundary condition, but Abaqus suggests that a VDISP subroutine is required, and I didn't find anything related to using ODB mesh data as a boundary condition.