When you define general contact, the app includes small-sliding interactions in the general contact definition automatically; there is no need to manually specify surface pairs. The detection of small-sliding interactions is based on the model's geometry, not the corresponding mesh. When you define general contact, the app creates a contact initialization feature and assignment automatically. You can delete the feature or the assignment, but doing so renders the general contact definition invalid. SmoothingThe app uses a CAD-based algorithm to smooth any contacting surfaces and to improve the accuracy and robustness of the simulation. Smoothing can reduce stress noise and contact pressure noise in the results, providing a more uniform and accurate solution. For simulations involving small deformation, smoothing is most beneficial when the discretized mesh is coarse and contains first-order elements in the contact region; however, significant benefits are common even when the mesh is quite refined or contains higher-order elements. For simulations involving large deformation, smoothing often has an insignificant effect if the geometry-correction distances are small compared to the element dimensions. However, smoothing can degrade the solution accuracy in some cases. The effectiveness of surface-to-surface contact smoothing does not degrade when there is relative motion between the contacting surfaces; for example, the smoothing technique works well for cases involving large sliding contact but small deformation. Smoothing contacting surfaces does not overcome all robustness and accuracy issues associated with a coarse mesh. For example, resolving complex stress variations requires adequate mesh refinement. Use of extremely coarse meshes at curved contact interfaces still tends to degrade simulation robustness. | ||||||||||||||