how to assign self-contact property to beam

[kev66]

Hi,
I am new to Ansys with some experience with ABAQUS. I am trying to simulate pulling a curved beam straight and during the process, the beam will touch itself. I was able to do this in ABAQUS but in Ansys, I am having trouble trying to assign some kind of contact or interaction (hard contact, rough surface) so that the beam doesn't go through itself when touching. The following is what I've done:

I am doing this in Ansys 13 workbench.
My geometry is created as follows:
1) created a 3D curve (in the xy-plane) by reading external coordinate file;
2) created a line body from the 3D curve and assigned a rectangular cross section to the curve to make it into a beam (does this actually make the line body into a beam element or do I need to explicitly assign it somewhere)?

Model:
I could find contact setup under "connections" --> contact but that seems to require two surfaces which I cannot select from my beam formed by the line body.

I know I probably can get this done if I actually create a 3D solid and assign contacts that way but I'd like to reduce the computation load if possible.

Could someone please give some pointers on how this can be done?

Thanks.