Defining Contact Controls

You can use contact controls to choose automatic stabilization of rigid body motions in surface-based contact. The simulation automatically applies viscous damping to stabilize the motion.

If you do not apply the contact controls to any specific surface contact features, the stabilization is applied only to general contact in an explicit dynamic step.

Before you begin: You must have the surface-based contact pairs defined before creating the contact controls.
See Also
About Contact Controls
Defining Surface-Based Contact in Implicit Steps
In Other Guides
Selection of Other Entities
  1. From the Interactions section of the action bar, click Contact Controls .
  2. Optional: Enter a descriptive Name.
  3. Select the Surface contact features to which the stabilization will be applied.

    You can select the feature glyphs in the model, or choose Sim feature from the drop-down list to select the surface contact pairs by name.

    If you do not choose any surface contact features and leave the default Global setting, the contact controls stabilization is applied only to general contact in an explicit dynamic step. In this case, no stabilization is applied to surface contact pairs you defined within general contact.

  4. Optional: Change the Stabilization factor or enter a Stabilization coefficient.

    The damping coefficient is automatically calculated by the solver. You can enter a Stabilization factor to scale the automatically calculated damping coefficient if needed. An alternate approach is to specify the Stabilization coefficient directly.

  5. Optional: Enter a Tangent fraction.
  6. Optional: Enter a value for Fraction of damping at end of step.
  7. Click OK.