Understanding stress linearization

Stress linearization is the separation of stresses through a section into constant membrane and linear bending stresses. Stress linearization is available for output databases only. To linearize stresses in Abaqus/CAE, the following procedure is used:

  • You define a section through your model. You specify the endpoints of the section by selecting nodes in the model, coordinates in space, or a saved path.

  • Abaqus/CAE defines the stress line by interpolating between the two endpoints to obtain a user-specified number of equal intervals along a straight line.

  • You can save the stress line as a path; the saved path includes the endpoints and each interval point along the stress line. If you save the stress line as a path, Abaqus/CAE always creates a point list path, regardless of the method that you used to define the endpoints.

  • The specified stress results are obtained at equally spaced intervals along the line in a local coordinate system defined by the line.

  • Abaqus/CAE performs stress linearization calculations and displays the results in the form of an X–Y plot. You can choose to save the data and/or to write it to a file.

If you linearize stresses across multiple part instances, the results will be averaged for any points that exist in more than one part instance.

To obtain linearized stresses along a line, select ToolsQuery from the main menu bar, then select Stress linearization from the Visualization Module Queries options.


In this section:

Defining the stress line
Extraction of the stress results