Contact Surfaces

 

Contact surfaces are defined in the history part of an ABAQUS/Explicit input file or the model definition part of an ABAQUS/Standard input file. The interface automatically places these entities into the correct part of the file depending upon the user's selection of ABAQUS/Standard or ABAQUS/Explicit via a resource (see section 1.4). Contact surfaces are associated via a contact pair (see section 2.13). Example 9.4 illustrates the definition of contact surfaces and contact pairs.

Contact surfaces are defined in FEMGEN by placing all lines or surfaces associated with the contact surface into a set whose name begins with the characters 'SURF'. The remaining four characters of the set name can be any printable character. Any such contact surface, that is not explicitly used in a contact pair definition, will be considered as a single surface contact definition.

All surface normals in a contact surface for shell and rigid elements must point in the direction in which contact is anticipated. This is because the interface will always associate the S1 face of such elements with the contact surface. For three-dimensional elements, and the egdes of plate elements, the interface program determines the correct contact face/edge identifier automatically as per pressure loads.