Joining a SOLID peg to a SHELL plate

[ConorWalsh]

hello all,

I am currently trying to set up a contact model to model a cylindrical peg being inserted into a cylindrical hole in 3 dimensions and monitor the contact forces and moments based on various lateral and angular misalignments.

I am planning on modeling the peg and the hole as sold models and using the contact wizard for the conatct analysis. However the device that is holding the peg, a simple end-effector, is designed with a shell elements at the base and so the need to be able to model the solid to shell conection.

I see that shells have 6dof at each node, three translation and three rotation, and solids have only have three translation ,UX,UY,UZ and I am thinking that the loads will not be trasferred correctly.

I have the endeffector platform as a shell elements as I exploit the three rotational dof to make simple ball joints by releasing the degrees of freedom of the node. I.e. free to rotate in RX,RY,RX and I have 6 beams connecting via these 'ball joints' to the base plate. The end-effector is similar to the stewart platform.

I hope you can help
Thanks

Conor