Defining contact initialization simplifies your simulation by making minor changes to the initial position of the components. The goal of contact initialization is for the general contact surfaces to be touching before the simulation begins. By default, the Abaqus solvers adjust the position of slightly overclosed surfaces in general contact. The app uses contact initializations to modify the default behavior. Each contact initialization definition contains a set of adjustment rules. After you have created a contact initialization definition, you must assign it to specific surface pairs in the general contact definition.
Small initial contact overclosures are resolved by default using strain-free adjustments to the positions of surface nodes. You can define alternative contact initialization methods and then assign them to contact interactions. For example, you can choose to have initial overclosures for certain interactions treated as interference fits. For a static step or a static perturbation step, you can treat contact interactions with the small-sliding formulation, which is more efficient than the default finite-sliding formulation in some cases. When using the small-sliding formulation, you can also choose to resolve clearances and overclosures by using contact offsets instead of strain-free adjustments. | |||||||||||||