Contact with Membrane elements

[nonlinearRus]

Hi all,

I am trying to model a seating system in Abaqus CAE. I'm using a hyperelastic+Visco model to model the behaviour of the foam and for now I'm modelling the person sitting as a hard wooden material. My model is working quite well for now but my results are a bit off as I have not modelled the seat cover in my simulation.

I thought that using membrane elements would be suitable to model the cover as they only calculate transverse stresses and not forces normal to the surface but I can't find a way to allow the membrane elements to have contact on both sides - which I need to model. As far as I'm aware the membrane elements only act as a skin on top and are bonded to the surface they are applied to.

Can anyone suggest a way for me to model the behaviour of the seat cover with friction contact on both sides. Can I do this with membrane elements or should I use some other shell elements or could I create a skinny 3-D volume and try and find suitable material values to model its behaviour?

Any help is appreciated,

nonlinearRus