{"id":21818,"date":"2019-03-20T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/?p=21818"},"modified":"2019-08-01T11:57:34","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T15:57:34","slug":"be-the-first-to-know-general-contact-coming-soon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/2019\/03\/be-the-first-to-know-general-contact-coming-soon.html","title":{"rendered":"Be the first to know \u2013 \u201cGeneral Contact\u201d has just launched!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may know that SOLIDWORKS<\/a> <\/strong>just launched a new product on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform<\/a>: Structural Professional Engineer<\/a><\/strong>. What is Structural Professional Engineer<\/a>?<\/strong> It is a Finite Element Analysis or structural analysis software application powered by Abaqus<\/a><\/strong>, the best non-linear solver on the market. Structural Professional Engineer<\/a><\/strong> expands SOLIDWORKS Simulation<\/a><\/strong> capabilities to more advanced nonlinear solutions: large deformation & large strain, robust contact, a wide range of non-linear material models, quad and hex meshing and cloud computing. Among many exciting features about this product, one of my favorites is General Contact.<\/p>\n

General Contact allows users to define contact between all or multiple regions of a model. The software recognizes those components that mate as a single interaction where anything can hit anything. As a result, it will automatically determine and enforce contact compatibility between components.<\/p>\n

Figure 1 illustrates how the interaction between 3 parts are treated as a single contact domain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fig 1. General Contact (everything is treated in 1 domain)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Figure 2 shows General Contact being automatically created when model is imported from SOLIDWORKS<\/a> into Structural Professional Engineer<\/a>. All contact pairs between components are treated as one single contact domain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fig 2. General Contact is the default Contact Algorithm in<\/strong>\u00a0Structural Professional Engineer<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

By contrast, without General contact, you would need to define multiple Contact Pairs to specify what would hit and where as illustrated in Figure 3.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fig 3. Contact Pair is the alternate method (define 6 contact pairs)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Figure 4 shows a Contact Pair being generated using the Contact Pair method between the top metal plate and the rubber bumper. For this simulation model, we will need to define a Contact Pair between the bottom plate and the rubber bumper and other Contact Pairs to include all surfaces of the rubber part that will self-contact with each other as illustrated in Figure 3.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fig 4. Contact Pair between top plate and rubber part<\/strong><\/p>\n

General Contact is an efficient way to get the software to find and determine where contact occurs. General Contact will save you a ton of time, especially when working with models that have many complex contacts.<\/p>\n

Another benefit is it will increase the accuracy of your model. This is particularly helpful when models are going through large deformation, large strain or when they are self-contacting.<\/p>\n

An example of self-contact is shown in Figure 5 where, using General Contact, users don\u2019t have to predict, select and organize which surfaces will come into contact with any other surfaces before running the analysis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fig 5. Von Mises stress plot of the rubber bumper model<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

General Contact in Structural Professional Engineer<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0allows for a highly automated contact definition, which makes users much more productive. However, there is often a trade-off between ease of defining contact and analysis performance.<\/p>\n

To find out more about Structural Professional Engineer click here<\/strong>!<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may know that SOLIDWORKS just launched a new product on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform: Structural Professional Engineer. What is Structural Professional Engineer? It is a Finite Element Analysis or structural analysis software application powered by Abaqus, the best non-linear solver<\/p>\n... Continued<\/a>","protected":false},"author":302,"featured_media":21824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2498,30],"tags":[291,2594],"class_list":["post-21818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3dexperience","category-solidworks-simulation","tag-simulation","tag-structural-professional-engineer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/302"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21818"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24462,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21818\/revisions\/24462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}