# Adjusting initial surface positions and specifying initial clearances for contact pairs in Abaqus/Explicit

 Adjustments to the positions of the slave nodes in an Abaqus/Explicit contact pair: are performed for all contact pairs that have slave nodes that are overclosed and that do not have specified initial clearances, except when nodes of a rigid body act as slave nodes; can eliminate small gaps or penetrations caused by numerical roundoff when a graphical preprocessor such as Abaqus/CAE is used; do not create any strains or momentum in the model during the first step of a simulation; do create strains and momentum in subsequent steps of a simulation; should not be used to correct gross errors in the mesh design; and should not be used to resolve initial overclosures involving a slave node that is pinched between two master surfaces. If the small-sliding contact formulation (see Contact formulations for contact pairs in Abaqus/Explicit) is used, an alternative to adjusting the position of the surfaces is to define the initial clearances between the surfaces precisely in both magnitude and direction. The following topics are discussed:
 Related Topics About contact pairs in Abaqus/Explicit In Other Guides *CLEARANCE *CONTACT PAIR Defining surface-to-surface contact

ProductsAbaqus/ExplicitAbaqus/CAE