Specifying contact controls in an Abaqus/Standard analysis

You can specify contact controls for surface-to-surface contact and self-contact interactions in an Abaqus/Standard analysis. For a detailed discussion, see Adjusting contact controls in Abaqus/Standard.

Warning:

Contact controls are intended for advanced users. The default settings of these controls are appropriate for most analyses. Using nondefault values of these controls may greatly increase the computational time of the analysis, produce inaccurate results, or cause convergence problems.

Related Topics
Contact controls editors
Customizing contact controls
In Other Guides
About contact pairs in Abaqus/Standard

  1. From the main menu bar, select InteractionContact ControlsCreate.

  2. In the Create Contact Controls dialog box that appears, do the following:

    • Name the contact controls.

    • Select Abaqus/Standard contact controls as the type of contact controls.

  3. Click Continue to close the Create Contact Controls dialog box.

    The Edit Contact Controls dialog box appears.

  4. In the Stabilization portion of the editor, you can specify controls relating to automatic stabilization of rigid body motions in contact problems using viscous damping.

    • Select one of the following:

      • Select Automatic stabilization to use the default damping coefficient calculated automatically by Abaqus/Standard. If desired, you can enter a value for the Factor by which the default damping coefficient will be multiplied.

      • Select Stabilization coefficient to specify the damping coefficient directly, and enter a value.

    • In the Tangent fraction field, enter a value for the fraction of the normal stabilization by which to modify the tangential stabilization. By default, the tangential and normal stabilization are the same.

    • Enter a value for the Fraction of damping at end of step.

    • Specify the Clearance at which damping becomes zero.

      • Select Computed to use the default clearance value calculated by Abaqus/Standard.

      • Select Specify to enter a value for the clearance at which the damping becomes zero.

  5. In the Augmented Lagrange portion of the editor, you can specify controls for interactions defined with a contact interaction property that uses augmented Lagrangian surface behavior.

    • In the Stiffness scale factor field, enter a value for the factor by which Abaqus/Standard will scale the default penalty stiffnesses to obtain the stiffnesses used for the contact pairs. The default value is 1.

    • In the Penetration tolerance field, select one of the following to specify the allowable penetration that is permitted to violate the impenetrability condition:

      • Select Absolute, and enter a value for the allowable penetration.

      • Select Relative, and enter the ratio of the allowable penetration to the characteristic contact surface face dimension. The default value is 0.001.

  6. Click OK to create the contact controls and to close the editor.