The following basic contact formulations are available:
- Bonded connections firmly attach surfaces to one
another during the simulation, as if they were glued or welded together.
- Sliding contact
allows the surfaces to move and slide across each other with friction. You
must specify the friction coefficient. The surfaces can slide only a
small distance.
- Thermal contact defines the heat transfer properties
between two surfaces.
The methods for creating contact formulations are listed below:
- General contact
- General contact automatically finds all exterior surfaces in the model that
can touch one another and simulates
sliding frictional contact between them.
General contact simplifies the process of defining contact in your
simulation, especially for a complex model with many interacting parts that
move or deform during the simulation.
- Contact detection
- Contact detection identifies all potentially contacting surface pairs in the
model and lets you automatically create surface-based contact features for
each pair.
- Surface-based contact
- Surface-based contact defines the interaction between one specific pair of
surfaces.
Depending on your simulation type and solution
mode (linear vs. nonlinear), only some of these methods may be available. The
table below describes which methods are available in each type of simulation, and the
specific formulations of physical contact allowed.