thanks everyone for the answers! just because i haven't said anything doesn't mean i've been ignoring the issue. the conclusion is that, indeed, i would need to perform a transient analysis and this is simply not an option at the moment due to the complexity of the assembly / limited hardware...
i've been doing a few PSD analyses using Abaqus and i was interested in modelling contacts between some parts. so far i've been using tie constraints which means i have no relative displacement between the node set pairs in that particular interaction. however, this causes a lot of stiffness...
