Limit to Point Based Fasteners?

[Lescombes]

Hello all,

I am creating an assembly in Abaqus V6.10 which consists of 5 3D deformable shell parts connected with point based fasteners. Fasteners are common to either 3, 4 or 5 of the parts and are based on points defined on the extreme part surface.

When viewing the connectors created in the Visualization workbench after the model has solved, none of the connectors extend through more than (n - 1) parts - if there are 5 parts, the fastener is projected to 4; if there are 4 layers, the fastener is projected to 3 and so on. I've tried both identifying the target surfaces by picking or choosing the whole model option in the Fasteners definition dialogue box. I've also tried identifying points on both the extreme layers with no difference to the number of layers connected. I've also specified the maximum number of layers of 5 with no influence.

Is there a limit to how many layers Abaqus can project these point based fasteners to? Or am I overlooking something else?

Thank you,
Greg

 

[Lescombes]

For those whom may be interested: problem solved.

It appears ABAQUS is a little quirky when it comes to self-identifying which features to project the fastener points to. If you leave it to determine affected parts along a projection vector (IIRC the facet by facet method), some may miss out (which was my problem) despite them only existing t/2 away from each other. To overcome this I specified my own influence radius in the fastener properties dialogue box. From my testing ABAQUS appears to show little sensitivity to this number: eg. I made it very large (>> 100t) and it (a) didn't mind and (b) successfully captured all the parts.