Dear Ayad,

if understand your question correctly you can divide your step into four different steps but you should take care about the loading (meaning if the load for each step is propagated or not).

To help you, could you please provide some information regarding the step time and the increment options you use?

Thank you dear Anargyros

My simulation is about bending a thin plate by placing it between 2 analytical parts.

I use smooth amplitude.

Its a Metal forming problem

Dear Ayad,

one way to solve your problem is to use the restart analysis option provided by Abaqus.

with this options you divide your step into number of runs.

Late reply but might help someone. I believe you are running a Implicit analysis in ABAQUS Standard.

Yes, you can absolutely divide your step time into the number of increments you may need. But, it is not in the best interest of the user to divide like this. And yes, it will affect the output in the point that you might miss convergence.

The thing that you want to do - dividing into 4 steps with increment size = 0.25 can be done in a Fixed time Increment option only. This option can be found under Incrementation tab in the Steps module. Only Fixed incrementation option allows you to choose the incrementation size and allows greater degree of user control over the incrementation. But, you cannot do it in the Automatic option as here ABAQUS itself automatically decides the time size and only asks you for the initial time increment.

However, it is in the best interest of the user to not specify such steps and you should allow ABAQUS to auto calculate the increment size. This is based on the convergence. Another problem with breaking it into steps will pose a scenario where you might miss convergence. To achieve easy convergence, always allow automatic time incremenation. In case your simulation involves transition from Linear to Non-Linear analysis, then in such a case, the user defined time size has higher chances of missing the transition point thereby causing multiple cutbacks.

Regarding the shutting down of your computer, you can make use of the .res fiile which is the restart file. The above was for the analysis, in case, you want to recover changes made to the CAE file, use the .rec (recover) file. But the important point with the .res file is that you should tell to ABAQUS about your intention to create a restart file before start of simulation. This will allow ABAQUS to save restart data at a suitable frequency. Again, the frequency of extraction of data for the restart file is defined by the user.

It is better to specify a suitable frequency to extract simulation data to the restart file. This will help reducing the size of the .res file.

There is also the *time step option that allows you to force abaqus to subdivide the step.