What's the difference in the solutions between selecting the contact mesh in the fem file as opposed to using the contact surface in the simulation file?
I have tried to get thorough answers on this as well. My understanding is that contact mesh is carried over from Ideas and contact surface is a new feature in NX and operates similarly to contact setup in ANSYS and Abaqus. One definite difference is the ability to plot contact pressure with surf-to-surf contact. I also believe the surf-to-surf contact is more forgiving on mesh criteria i.e. misalignment and different mesh sizes between 2 surfaces. You also have added funcionality with surf-to-surf contact being able to artificially offset contact surfaces and either model gaps or close the gaps. I was also told that NX nmay drop contact mesh. The downside to surf-to-surf contact is that it takes a lot longer to solve. In fact it takes much longer than ANSYS or Abaqus to solve for comparable problems. Furthermore you can only select contact gluing or modified Lagrange.
One tip in using surf-to-surf contact.
Have similar mesh sizes between the 2 surfaces. This enables you to turn off mesh refinement parameters in .sim environment and keeps the sim time to a min (though still very long).
