Dear Leah,

Which contact formulation are you using?

Could we have the *.inp model to take a look?

Best regards,

Victor

Thanks Victor for your response. I am using the General Contact, automatically assigning smoothing for the geometric faces, but with all other default options left the same. I have attached my input file.

Thanks

Leah

Dear Leah,

My guess at this moment is that the problem comes from a combination of two facts:

• You have poorly meshed 3D contact surfaces (http://abaqusdoc.ucalgary.ca/books/usb/pt09ch35s01aus172.html#d0e416109)
• General contact uses surface-to-surface contact discretizations. The surface-to-surface formulation is primarily intended for common situations in which normal directions of contacting surfaces are approximately opposite. In contrast, the node-to-surface contact formulation is often preferable for treating contact involving feature edges or corners if the respective slave and master facet normal directions are not approximately opposite in the active contact region. (http://abaqusdoc.ucalgary.ca/books/usb/pt09ch34s01aus165.html#d0e409551)

So, what I would do:

• First of all, is there any reason for not using 2D simplifications? In your case I think it would be reasonable to use plane stress/plane strain assumptions (although maybe I am missing something), that would ease your problem.
• In case you don't want to use 2D simplifications, I would use a more dense mesh in the thickness direction of the plate. Only having one element in the thickness direction could cause some problems for the contact.
• I would use contact pairs instead of general contact. It could be easier to swap between contact discretizations and find any problem that may arise as a consequence of the contact.

Hope you find this useful.

Best regards,

Victor

Thanks Victor. I think my main problem is probably mesh refinement - it doesn't seem to make much of a difference whether I use node-to-surface or surface to surface contact. You are right that this particular model could be done with 2D simplifications, but I am trying to get this model working before I make a more complex one with applied loads in 3 directions.