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