Contact Assessment

Applications

Evaluation of contact-induced stress: Stress assessment is often difficult when the stiffness of contact partners are highly different. Therefore, contact evaluation is often used in anomaly detection to detect possible locations of model inaccuracies.
Accurate contact assessment is inevitable in the interaction evaluation in a causal chain analysis
Detection of uncertain events like small contacts over time by assessment of the overlap area
Use our Animator4 - Matlab Interface to accelerate your manual post-processing. Show interacting components with one line of code

Challenge

Finite Element Solvers often do not provide useful outputs to conclude which element or node is in contact and which element or node is the contact partner. In post processing applications this might be of major interest. Basically, it is a geometric nearest neighbor search where the direction of contact, as well as geometric properties of shell and beam elements must be taken into account.

Solution

Our tools provide several methods and options to evaluate contact partners and properties on several levels:

Set-to-Set evaluation: Check which elements of two sets are in contact
Global evaluation: Check contact partner elements of one selection. A self contact on part level can be excluded optionally
The search direction may be physically based, e.g. by a solver results defining a contact pressure, or geometrically by a face normal vector
Two algorithms are currently implemented to find contact. The first uses a cylinder to find a contact partner, leading to a fast evaluation with reduced accuracy when multiple parts are in contact. The second is a face intersection algorithm leading to accurate results.
Several outputs may be requested
- Contact partners on nodal, elemental or part level
- Condensated contact point on part level
- Cumulated contact force on part level
- Fraction of overlap on part level. This can be requested as projected overlap or cumulated area of contact partner elements