Beam Beam Contact Explicit 2

[twillis]

Hi

I'm having some problems trying to model beam on beam contact in Abaqus. I've been able to model beam on beam contact in standard by modifying the model keywords to include edge to edge contact formulation. However, the number of beam contacts is resulting in a slow or non converging model. Therefore, I've tried to simulate the same problem using explicit and general contact. However, the beam profile is not recognised in the contacts and the beams are passing through each other.

Could anyone shed any light on how I can resolve this? I've read that shell elements can be applied as a surface to represent the beam profile. However, I can't find much information on how I go about achieving this in CAE.

Regards

T

 

[cooken]

General contact in Explicit accounts for beam thickness, but does so by assuming a circular cross section with radius calculated from the area of the specified profile. So if you have, for example, a wide but thin rectangular profile, the radius used for contact will be too small for the width and too big for the thickness. You can manually override the default radius with a surface thickness assignment (under the surface properties tab in CAE). Depending on the application, you might be able to get away with just doing this, but if you need to account for a more complicated contact surface the only way I know of is with surface elements. In CAE you can create your beam part, then extrude the shell geometry right over it (lots of ways of doing this, depends on your geometry). For explicit you then need to assign a surface section property with a density. Mesh with SFM3D4 elements, then use a surface tie to attach the beam elements to the contact surface.