Defining Sensors

For nodal, connector element, and some whole surface contact output variables, history output requests can be used to define sensors. Sensors are named entities that are intended to be used to model physical sensors such as the total force or displacement of a hydraulic piston, the motion of a given point on a structure, or the acceleration as measured by an accelerometer. Sensor values can be fed back into the model to produce actuation that is a function of the sensed quantity thus allowing for modeling of control engineering aspects of your system.

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*OUTPUT

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You can use sensors in user subroutine UAMP or VUAMP to define a customized amplitude that is a function of sensor values at the end of the previous increment as shown in VUAMP and illustrated in the example in Crank mechanism. Alternatively, you can export sensor values to a Functional Mockup Unit (FMU) and import computed actuation information; that is, the current amplitude value of an amplitude function in a co-simulation (see System-Level Modeling between Logical and Physical Interactions). In these cases you can use the amplitude function to actuate any Abaqus feature that can reference an amplitude, such as concentrated loads, boundary conditions, connector motion/load, distributed pressure, and material properties via field variables.

A sensor must be uniquely associated with a particular scalar output variable (U1, CTF3, etc.) and can be defined using history output requests by following some simple rules. The sensor name is specified in the history output definition, and one and only one nodal output, element output, or whole surface request can be defined for each sensor. For whole surface contact or contact pair output requests, only the magnitude and the center of the total force due to contact pressure (CFNM and XN, respectively) are supported. Because the named sensor must be a unique real number at a given time, the node set or element set used to define the sensor must contain only one member. Moreover, regardless of the user-specified output frequency, sensors are computed at every increment during the analysis. However, they are written to the output database according to the user-specified frequency.

Input File Usage

Use the following options to define a sensor using element output:

OUTPUT, HISTORY, SENSOR,  NAME=name
ELEMENT OUTPUT
element output variable

Use the following options to define a sensor using nodal output:

OUTPUT, HISTORY, SENSOR,  NAME=name
NODE OUTPUT
nodal output variable

Use the following options to define a sensor using contact output:

OUTPUT, HISTORY, SENSOR,  NAME=name
CONTACT OUTPUT
contact or contact pair output variable (CFNM or XN)