Continue to Site

Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations GregLocock on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Automatic contact generation

Status
Not open for further replies.

geo2006

Geotechnical
Jan 5, 2006
22
Hi,

I'm working with Abaqus in a model with many different parts, so there are many contact interactions. But manually defining all the master-slave pairs is tedious, and inefficient, so I'm looking for a faster (and easier) way. Any help is really appreciated.

Thanks
 
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

Hi

If your model is 3D in ABAQUS/Explicit, you could look at using general contact. If not, I think you will be stuck with defining contact pairs.

Regards

Martin
 
Hi bassmanjax (Martin),

thanks for your info.

And yes, my model is 3D. But although I tried, I can't make my model works. I'm using CAE to enter the data, and when defining contacts, I use "general contact" as you explained (option says "Explicit only"). But when I try to submit it, a message like "only for Abaqus/Explicit" appears. But that's what I'm doing!!, I suppose. Reading the User's Manual or the CAe Manual wasn't helpful either.

I think that is a simple problem, but I can't get it. Any help will be really appreciated.

Thanks.

 
Change the type of analysis in the step module

corus
 
Thanks to both, very helpful tips. My model is running now. The only problem is that it takes a lot of time to be completed, but I suppose there's something bad in the analysis adjustments(step length, duration, etc). Hope that find the answer soon.

Thanks again.
 
Hi

Check the length of your time step - you can do quasi-static analysis with Explicit with quite short time steps. For metal forming models, I've used time steps of between 0.01-0.1 sec depending on the job.

You should also look up mass scaling in the docs. Used carefully, it will help to speed up the computation time. The tradeoff with mass scaling is knowing how much is acceptable - too much mass scaling and your model is meaningless.

If you're new to ABAQUS/Explicit, I'd strongly reccomend taking the time to leaf through the appropriate manual sections aswell.

Good luck!

Martin
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor