×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Beam Beam Contact Explicit

Beam Beam Contact Explicit

Beam Beam Contact Explicit

(OP)
Hi

I'm having some problems trying to model beam on beam contact in Abaqus. I've been able to model beam on beam contact in standard by modifying the model keywords to include edge to edge contact formulation. However, the number of beam contacts is resulting in a slow or non converging model. Therefore, I've tried to simulate the same problem using explicit and general contact. However, the beam profile is not recognised in the contacts and the beams are passing through each other.

Could anyone shed any light on how I can resolve this? I've read that shell elements can be applied as a surface to represent the beam profile. However, I can't find much information on how I go about achieving this in CAE.

Regards

T

RE: Beam Beam Contact Explicit

General contact in Explicit accounts for beam thickness, but does so by assuming a circular cross section with radius calculated from the area of the specified profile. So if you have, for example, a wide but thin rectangular profile, the radius used for contact will be too small for the width and too big for the thickness. You can manually override the default radius with a surface thickness assignment (under the surface properties tab in CAE). Depending on the application, you might be able to get away with just doing this, but if you need to account for a more complicated contact surface the only way I know of is with surface elements. In CAE you can create your beam part, then extrude the shell geometry right over it (lots of ways of doing this, depends on your geometry). For explicit you then need to assign a surface section property with a density. Mesh with SFM3D4 elements, then use a surface tie to attach the beam elements to the contact surface.

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources