Shell edge contact

[ahkrit]

Hello.

Does anyone know how is a proper shell edge contact can be defined in Abaqus? More precisely contact between shell edge and another shell surface.
There is this paper attached about contact modelled in Abaqus. I mean the contact between the rigid bolt surface and the hole edge of the shell elements, how is it done? With general contact or contact pair?
The edge surface elements defined like at shell to solid coupling or on both surfaces of the shell elements?

Thanks!

 

[FEA way]

Currently, the recommended approach is general contact. This algorithm was significantly improved in recent releases and nearly replaced contact pairs that are now only necessary in very specific cases. General contact is especially good if you need to account for some non-standard scenarios such as edge-to-surface contact.

 

[NRP99]

Yes. General contact is the way to go. General contact "uses the finite-sliding, surface-to-surface contact formulation as the primary contact formulation, supplemented by the edge-to-surface, edge-to-edge, and vertex-to-surface contact formulations."

General contact algorithm will automatically choose any of the above based on the contact conditions. Also see-feature edge criteria setting for controls related to which edges to be considered for edge-to-surface contact.

 

[ahkrit]

Thanks for the comments. Actually i just found that with contact pair, with edge to surface options(hole edge nodes as node based surface and bolt rigid surface as element type surface) it works.
You think that general contact would be still better to use?

 

[FEA way]

You can try running this with general contact. Likely there will be some small differences due to characteristics of contact algorithm but I don’t think that they will be significant. If it works well and the results are good with contact pairs then there’s no need to switch to general contact.

 

[NRP99]

I would still recommend to use general contact for its robustness and convergence friendliness to surface to surface contact pair.

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