What’s New with Contact Technology in ANSYS 15.0

Contact technology is used extensively throughout ANSYS Mechanical and Mechanical APDL to enforce compatible behavior between different portions within a model. With each Release, ANSYS continues to improve the breadth and robustness of our contact technology.  In ANSYS 15.0, we have enhanced contact still further to help users build models more efficiently without compromising on robustness.

Trim Contact, first introduced in ANSYS 14.5, is a great tool for reducing the number of unnecessary contact and target elements in large assemblies.In ANSYS 15.0, we have changed the default to activate trim contact even for application involving large deflection.Many of you are probably aware that a Compression Only Support in Mechanical is simulated with a conventional rigid to flexible contact pair under the hood.  While this is a logical application for a nonlinear contact pair, it has sometimes introduced unintended convergence challenges for Mechanical users. For relatively flimsy structures, for example, the default penalty stiffness factor of the contact pair associated with a compression only support might be inappropriately large for the application. In ANSYS 15.0, the details window of compression only supports now gives users the ability to control the contact stiffness and the stiffness updating scheme.
Bolt assembly modeling has been enhanced with the new Increment load option. This option enables users to ramp from the previously solved adjustment to a new value for challenging bolted assemblies that will not solve with the conventional load and lock method.Also, if there is an interest in modeling the presents of Bolt Thread details, a new option has been added to the Contact details window that enables uses to include the bolt thread details without explicitly modeling them.Also, if there is an interest in modeling the presents of Bolt Thread details, a new option has been added to the Contact details window that enables uses to include the bolt thread details without explicitly modeling them.Also, if there is an interest in modeling the presents of Bolt Thread details, a new option has been added to the Contact details window that enables uses to include the bolt thread details without explicitly modeling them.

In the past, some users have expressed an interest in simulating physical wear between sliding frictional surfaces. Now in ANSYS 15.0, you can do just this with the new Archard Wear Model. This algorithm moves the contact nodes to new positions based on calculated material volume loss as a function of pressure, relative velocity and material hardness.

To learn more about these and other contact related enhancements, please tune in to the next ASK THE EXPERTS session scheduled for April 16th at 9:00 am ET and again onApril 30th at 4:00 pm ET.

Source: ansys-blog