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Beam-Shell Contact

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Stringmaker

Mechanical
Mar 18, 2005
513
I'm trying to tie beam elements to shell elements and having a bit of difficulty. Here are the steps I'm taking now:

1) In the contact wizard select the target type as "pilot node only (advanced option)"

2) In the next step I select the pilot node to be they keypoint at the end of the beam which lies on the shell surface.

3) For the contact surface I pick three to four nodes from the shell elements in close proximity to where the beam element should tie onto the surface of the shell elements.

4) In the next step I specify that I want a force distributed constraint, user specified in all DOF's.

Whenever I go to create the contact pair I get an error message that reads:

"No surface elements were generated because no exterior face of the selected element set has all of its nodes selected."

I'm stumped here. I've used this same method to successfully tie beam-solids together but for some reason it isn't working for beam-shell elements. I've looked in the documentation under the "Surface Based Constraints" and this seems to be the way which it indicates to use.

Ultimately, what I'm trying to do here is tie a point mass using very low mass beam elements to a circuit board which I have modeled with shell elements. I'd appreciate any input on this. Is there any other means to go about this? Unfortunately, due to my model I'm forced to use contact elements here.

Thanks in advance!
-Brian
 
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Please disregard my post...I've since discovered that in order to have nodes you need to have the area meshed. Duh! Trivial mistake on my part.

Thanks,
-Brian
 
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