Nodes constrained on arbitrary plane in Abaqus

[AdamBown]

Hi,
Trying to do something which I thought should be really easy but cant seem to find anything obvious.

I am trying to constrain a single node, or set of nodes, to lie on a plane, e.g free to slide about within that plane. Translational restraint only. Plane can be defined by three nodes, or a point and normal vector, either/or.

Effectively an axis of symmetry.

Similar to xsymm or ysymm etc, but in an arbitrary direction...

Any takers?
Cheers guys and gals.

 

[corus]

Use a local co-ordinate system defined by 3 points, and retrain the nodes relative to that system.

 

[AdamBown]

Cheers Corus, good idea. I guess the local coord system can be input via the keyword *system. Would you know how the boundary is fixed relative to local system in the .inp file, e.g is it a sub option of *boundary?
(unfortunately I am writing this inp from scratch rather than using CAE)
Cheers again.

 

[burningDiesel]

you have the *transform option to change the csys for nodes, the boundary then works as normal (but in the local csys for those nodes).

 

[AdamBown]

yep, that looks like the one. Cheers Corus and sdebock...