Dear Users, I'm working on a simulation with two static general steps using Abaqus: Step 1: Thermal loading (cooling). Step 2: Mechanical loading. I've defined a surface-to-surface contact interaction with small sliding, using a cohesive surface-based interaction property. Damage initiation and evolution criteria are also defined. The challenge I am facing is that after the damage initiation criteria gets fulfilled during the cooling step (Step 1), the CSDMG variable to observe the damage evolution criteria starts; however, when the simulation transitions to the mechanical loading step (Step 2), the CSDMG remains constant and does not change further. Interestingly, if I disable the first step (thermal loading) and only run the mechanical loading step (Step 2), the damage initiation and evolution criteria are fulfilled correctly. This issue only occurs when I run both steps sequentially, starting with the cooling step. I'm wondering if cohesive surface-based interaction properties are intended to work across multiple steps or if there are specific settings or considerations needed to ensure damage evolution continues in subsequent steps when starting with a thermal step.

My goal is to observe the debonding phenomenon in the loading step(2) and for that I tried defining the interaction only for the step 2, but as there is no interaction property defined between the two parts in step 1, the parts debonds and again comes to contact during the start of the loading step where the interaction is defined and it causes convergence issues. When I define tie constraint for step 1 and cohesive interaction for step 2, Abaqus gives an error stating that the same surface pairs cannot be used for Tie and contact pair and vice versa.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your support!