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Differences stress extrapolation Ansys & Abaqus

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jfonken

Bioengineer
Oct 30, 2020
6
Hi all,

As a subproject in my PhD project, I'm comparing Ansys and Abaqus (geometrically) nonlinear solution methods. I used a simple cylinder to represent an artery and modelled it with a simple Neo-Hookean material model. Large deformations (NLGEOM) are turned on (hence the non-linearity). I used 20-nodes hexahedral elements with reduced integration and a mixed UP-formulation.

When I compared the nodal results, I saw that the absolute differences in displacement were very small (10^-10 m). However, the absolute difference in stress goes up to 6*10^4 Pa (figure 'nodalResults',
The figure 'VonMises' ( shows the Von Mises stress distribution for the Ansys and Abaqus simulations. Which shows that the distribution is similar, but the values differ.

To find the cause of these differences in stress output, I looked at the stress at the integration points. The same (Gauss) interpolation points are used in Ansys and Abaqus, so the stresses at the integration points should resemble each other. Luckily, this is the case. The differences are small (up to 5 Pa for the normal stresses and up to 1 Pa for the shear stresses). See figure 'IntegrationPointResults' (
These results indicate that the differences in nodal stresses are caused by differences in the extrapolation and/or averaging method. I therefore want to know how the Ansys and Abaqus extrapolation and averaging methods exactly work and how they differ. However, I'm unable to find a clear answer to this question. For Ansys, I've found a table (figure AnsysDataVariation, explaining the assumed data variation used to extrapolate the stress values to the nodes, but I couldn't find any information about the coefficients.
 
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For such comparison it may be best to disable averaging. I’m not sure if it’s possible in Ansys, but you can do it easily in Abaqus (Result —> Options —> Computation).
 
Averaging can be deactivated in the options.
If you see a major difference between the value at the integration point and the extrapolated value to the node, then this is an indicator that your mesh is too coarse (or there is a singularity).
 
Thanks for your input! I'm going to look into this. However, I'm still interested in finding out how the results are extrapolated exactly in Ansys and Abaqus. Any ideas on that topic?
 
For Abaqus check the following documentation chapters: "Understanding how results are computed" and "Understanding result value averaging".
 
In the chapter 'Understanding how results are computed', this is basically everything they say about the extrapolation method:
"ABAQUS/CAE extrapolates results to the nodes using weighting appropriate for the element type and shape".

However, it doesn't specifies which weighting is used for which element type and shape.
 
I am not sure why:

a) you have to go digging this deep between codes as part of your dissertation. At some point along this process, you will hit a wall; these are not open source codes.
b) you need to use such an expensive mixed element formulation.

Anyway, try using a simple element type like a membrane and a simple deformation gradient tensor that is easy work with analytically so you can hand calculate what the stress ought to be for a simple material model.

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Is it also possible disable averaging without using the GUI? I don't have a full license on my own laptop, so I'm running my Abaqus simulations on the server of my university. I use the session.writeFieldReport (Python) command to extract the solution ( This results in an .rpt file containing the displacements and stresses at the nodes. This file starts with the note that the stresses are extrapolated and averaged ( However, I don't see any options in the session.writeFieldReport to unable the averaging.
 
Use outputPosition=ELEMENT_NODAL and you won't get averaged data. You will get one value per node for each element that is using this node.
 
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