Extracting Contact Half-Widths from CAE

[JOJOMO]

Hello all,

I'm trying to extract the contact half-widths from a spherical sliding contact analysis. I say half-widths because the contact area will be eliptical. Anyway, what I'm envisioning is finding all the nodes w/ positive pressure (in contact), then finding their location and displacement. Once I have these the nodes, the farthest away from the origin of contact will give me the contact half-widths. Does anyone know a quick (or better/easier) way to find this information in CAE? The plot of contact area just won't cut it.

I'm a relative novice with ABAQUS and have no python coding experience. All GUI so far.

 

[corus]

Plot Cpress but set the limit to be just greater than zero. This should show the contact area with everywhere else showing in black.

corus

 

[JOJOMO]

That's a good idea for graphical representation, which I will need to do, but I also want the actual lengths.

I'm running developing sliding asperity contact model and I'm sliding one sphere across another geometrically similar one at various preset vertical interferences. I'd like to try to fit some sort of regression to the contact half widths as a function of interference.