Defining General Contact

You can apply general contact for a fast and efficient method to specify contact behavior between many or all components in a model.

You can define only one general contact behavior in a simulation scenario.

The default general contact options apply to the majority of simulation cases. Therefore, in most cases, you only need to create the general contact feature.

Before you begin:
  • Define a buckling step, a frequency step, or a static perturbation step.
See Also
About General Contact
In Other Guides
About Step-dependent Actions
  1. From the Interactions section of the action bar, click General Contact .
    The app creates a default contact initialization feature and assigns it to the entire model.

    You can delete the default feature or the assignment, but you must then create a contact initialization to use in the general contact definition, as described in Defining Contact Initialization.

  2. Optional: Enter a descriptive Name.
  3. From the Included surface pairs options, select one of the following:
    OptionDescription
    All surfaces Enforces general contact for all surface pairs, unless you define the Specify excluded surfaces and Surface exclusions options.
    Specified surfaces Enforces general contact only for the surface pairs in Surface inclusions.
  4. If you selected Specified surfaces, select the surface pairs for which to assign the general contact definition.
    1. Expand the Surface inclusions section, and click Create inclusion.
    2. Select the supports for Surface 1 and Surface 2.

      Tip: You can use the context toolbar to help you select supports. The supports can be either surfaces or beams, but one support cannot contain a mix of both element types.

      The app highlights the supports that you select. Surfaces that belong to the main support (Surface 1) appear green, while surfaces that you select that belong to the secondary support (Surface 2) appear magenta.

      You can click to display the parts that are associated with Surface 1 only. Similarly, you can click the to display the parts that are associated with Surface 2 only.

    3. Click OK.

    You can repeat the above steps to include more surface pairs.

    The dialog box displays a table that shows the included surface pairs. You can select a row in the table to highlight the corresponding surfaces in the model.
  5. Optional: Select Specify excluded surfaces to remove specific surface pairs from the general contact definition.
    1. Expand the Surface exclusions section, and click Create exclusion.
    2. Select the supports for Surface 1 and Surface 2.
    3. Click OK.

    You can repeat the above steps to exclude more surface pairs.

    The dialog box displays a table that shows the excluded surface pairs. You can select a row in the table to highlight the corresponding surfaces in the model.
  6. Optional: Assign contact initialization definitions to correct small gaps or overclosures for specific surface pairs.
    1. Expand the Contact initialization assignments section, and click Create initialization assignment.
    2. Select the supports for Surface 1 and Surface 2.
    3. If the supports include shell geometry, verify that you have applied the contact interaction on the correct side of the surface.

      Tip: Click to change the side.

    4. From the Contact initialization options, select a contact initialization type to associate with the surface pair.
    5. Click OK.

    The app ignores any assignments that you make to surface pairs that are not included in the general contact definition.

  7. Click OK.