Dear Ruby,

I dont have much of an experience with Abaqus Since I work with ANSYS all the time. However, When I read your question, I thought that you may have problem with identifying the rigid material in contact with a deformable material. I always use a huge modulus of elasticity in case where I want to assume that my material is rigid. This method eliminates a lot of problems and adjustments required for defining contact between rigid and deformable material. Use this method and check whether your problem is solved or not.

As always, recomend the answer if worked in your case.

0.001mm is very small - how large are your elements? If penetration is small compared to element size, the contact algorithm may not catch it.

As a starting point, you could look at the examples manual - there is a model for Hertzian contact there.

Hi Ruby,

Hertzian contact is strictly valid when both sides are deformable. So when you make one side rigid you will deviate from the theory. How much that matters depends on the problem.

I have 2 suggestions:

1) Recover the RF on the rigid body, do you get anywhere near the 4kN?

2) I see you are using a meshed part that you made rigid using constraints. In this case your mesh refinement will affect the contact. I didn't load up your model, but you need quite a fine resolution on both sides of the contact to get good contact pressure distribution. It might be a good idea to replace the meshed rigid ball with an analytical rigid surface, that way you only need to worry about the mesh on the plate.

If you setup everything correctly, Abaqus does a very good job evaluating contact pressures, I've done it many times, it definitely works, I can say from experience.

Hope this helps, Best regards

David