About Surface Fasteners | |||||
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Surface fasteners are used to model the behavior of bodies joined at surfaces, such as glued or bonded joints, where the connection extends across the entire fastening surface. You can join part bodies or mesh parts with surface fasteners. You can also fasten a part to itself as long as a 2D surface exists between the faces being joined. You can search for potential fastener locations and define a fastener to apply to selected locations from the search results.
When the fastener is created and the model is meshed, the joined surfaces are meshed with a surface mesh and the fastener is meshed as a hexahedral mesh. Meshing the fastener as a solid body enables realistic simulation of all conditions that can be applied to the fastener through loading of the attached surfaces. 
Template Files
When you create a surface fastener, you can save the surface fastener definition to a template file. Once you create a template file, you can load the parameters back into the editor when you create other surface fasteners. After you have loaded parameters into your surface fastener definition, you can edit any of the parameters for that surface fastener as required. If you edit a template after surface fasteners have been created using the template, the surface fastener definitions are not updated automatically. To apply the changes, you need to reload the template file into the surface fastener definitions.