Beam To Beam Contact

[sbasspike]

Hello,

I am trying to capture fiber to fiber interactions in an Abaqus model. Essentially, imagine a cotton ball placed in a cube and one of the walls of the cube is moving inward causing the cotton fibers to compress and contact each other.

I would like to model the individual fibers with beams. These fibers will obviously contact each other and slip as the compression continues, so friction between them will be important. Furthermore, my fibers have some "barbs" on them that lock with other fibers.

I was wondering if anyone might have any insight on how I should go about modelling this problem in Abaqus?

I am trying to sort through all of the Abaqus manuals, but it can be a little overwhelming!

Many thanks in advance.

 

[hakanturkmen]

As far as I know, Abaqus/Standard won't help in making beams contact.

If you could switch to Abaqus/Explicit, then it is fairly easy to define a general contact condition which will handle beams (with the friction you like) as well. But locking them with "barbs", I don't know...

 

[dzhoucam]

I used to encounter similar case three months ago. There are possibly two choices:

1. use explicit through the general contact as hakanturkmen said.

2. model the fibre by 3D elements rather than beam.