Best software to simulate the behaviour of elastomeric material

[ClaraJ]

Hi everyone,
I would like to simulate the hyperelastic behaviour of elastomeric material. I know that the software MSC Marc and Abaqus are two FEA software for simulation, but I do not know the specific unit for elastomeric material for each software. I have few specific questions about the management of some feature:
- How is the incompressibility of material controlled ?
- How many behaviour laws are implanted in the software for hyperelasticity ?
- Could we manage easily the self heating of material ?
- Could we manage easily the contact between different parts ?
Thank you in advance for your collaboration and your answers!

 

[FEA way]

I don't know MSC Marc but I work in Abaqus so let me answer your question with regards to hyperelastic material modeling capabilities of this software:

- nearly incompressible materials can be modeled using regular elements but it is recommended to use hybrid elements with special formulation, fully incompressible materials must be modeled with these elements. As a side note, in explicit dynamics analyses you can use fully incompressible materials only in plane stress and uniaxial cases.

- Abaqus offers the following hyperelastic material models: Arruda-Boyce, Marlow, Mooney-Rivlin, Neo-Hookean, Ogden, polynomial, reduced polynomial, van der Waals, Yeoh

- to account for thermal effects you can use coupled temperature-displacement analysis step (both standard and explicit solvers support such simulation type). This is two way coupling so heat transfer will influence deformation and vice versa

- Abaqus has very good contact algorithms, especially for general contact (especially in explicit analyses). In fact this is probably the best software for contact problems.

 

[IceBreakerSours]

Just a few things to keep in mind:

a) There are quite a few software tools for modeling hyperelastic behavior. ANSYS/Mechanical, LS-DYNA (now owned by ANSYS), ADINA, COMSOL, Abaqus, MSC Marc are just the commercial tools. There are open source tools as well.
b) Not sure what you mean by "..specific unit for elastomeric material.." but I assume the list of questions are what you are aiming for here and not the unit system.
c) Incompressibility is an approximation. Nothing in reality is incompressible in absolute terms. Numerically, in some cases, incompressibility approximation in implicit can help. However, there are no free lunches; there is a price to pay. In addition to the extra DOF, incompressibility ruins the niceness of the stiffness matrix.
d) Large sliding contact between parts of dissimilar stiffness with one or more parts going through severe deformation is where I have experienced most tools that I have used struggle a lot. If the excessively deforming part also happens to be incompressible, good luck!

That being said, a "successful model" is a function of the user using a tool and the tool, among other things. So, the "best tool" depends on the person/management using/paying for the tool. I have seen PhDs from reputed schools do lousy work with the "best" tools. If I were you, I'd focus more on finding out what my own limitations are and, therefore, which tool is ideally suited for me. Perhaps, an inexpensive code and a consultant might be the right combination for me? Or, perhaps a code that offers excellent technical support at all times would be a good choice? Or, perhaps, I could download an open source code and get it running all by myself.

In the company I work for, I have had Abaqus gurus come to me to solve some of their most challenging problems for them and I use LS-DYNA (implicit and explicit).

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[ClaraJ]

Thank you for your answer. I used Abaqus during my studies and I never used MSC Marc or an other software. I do an internship in a company and they would like to get a FEA software, so they asked me about the best choice for modelling elastomeric materials.
To answer your question, yes I am new on the forum so thank you for the reading.
If I summarize well, both software are competitive, we just need to learn about the specific unit and how modelling the parameters we want.
Do you know if in the software MSC Marc, there are the same hyperelastic materials models (Arruda Boyce, Marlow, Ogden, ...) ?

 

[Mustaine3]

10 years ago MSC Marc was very competitive regarding nonlinear analysis to Abaqus. Now it isn't anymore. MSC lost focus in R&D, struggled and then changed ownership a few times. In my geo Marc has nearly disappeared from the market. MSC still lives because of their traditional Adams and Nastran customer.

 

[IceBreakerSours]

My *wild* guess is that the company is not ready to do/consume serious FEA. I would advise your management to work with a consultancy and learn about what goes into modeling elastomers from a numerical and experimental side before dumping money annually on licenses. Alternatively, they could use FEA embedded in design tools like SolidWorks.

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Are you new to this forum? If so, please read these FAQs:

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