Compression Only surface

[castleMadrid]

I am analysing a base plate which I want the bearing surface to be active only under compression.

I tried to use surface effect (SURF154) and specified the foundation stiffness (EFS) and set the surface tension (SURT) to a very small value. To test whether it works as a compression only, I tried to reverse the applied loads but I observed that the surface is taking tension.

Is there a simple way to do this rather than defining a rigorous contact pair?

 

[cbrn]

Hi,
to set up effectors acting only in one direction (non-holonomic restraints), I used COMBIN37 in Classical environment. They are a bit tricky to set up, but they work great. Note that, on a surface, in order to have uniform "foundation stiffness" the nodes must be equally spaced (so the mesh on the surface must be mapped, or its density must be sufficiently high in order to assume that the node distribution is uniform by approximation).

The best way to see how a "compression only" restraint-on-surface works, I think, is to set it up in Workbench and then write the ANSYS input file to see what it does.

Regards