contact elements...problematic?!

[aminjamali]

It's like few months I am dealing with different contact elements. I am getting to the point that Ansys is not really good in contact. Have you ever experienced weird problems with Asnsys? Let's share them, maybe we can reflect them to Ansys technical support! One of the very weird things I keep facing these days is that Ansys incompletely models my problem. In other words, after the modeling process and upon "list"ing the elements and I see that not all the surfaces are really having the contact elements. It simply forgets about the rest of surfaces of my interest!

 

[Stringmaker]

Ansys enforces contact where and how you tell it to when you create the contact elements. Ansys contact is not that bad. I'm a very experienced user and every once in a while even I find myself with a problem. Whenever I go back into the model with a fine-toothed comb it usually ends up being some user error on my part which I can attribute the nonconvergence to.

I do not understand what point you are trying to make about listing elements and contact not being enforced. Likely something is not in contact because you don't have a definition properly set. Just my thoughts...

A more specific example of your issue would be helpful.

Regards.

 

[aminjamali]

Please take a look at the attached picture. That's a bolt in a concrete block (all plane stress). The bolt is fixed and a horizontal load is applied on the block. I need to define contact elements between the bolt and the block (to study the load transfer). What contact element or elements would you use? The target is not one smooth surface, would you use only one target surface though? or maybe it's better to discretize it into 7 straight targets.

 

[aminjamali]

the picture...