Among several simple yet powerful techniques available in LS-DYNA, switching of bodies that affects their deformability (at run time) is certainly one of them. Switching of bodies with negligible internal strains to a rigidbody at user’s specification can be useful to eliminate the calculation of element-centered variables such as stresses, which in many applications could dominate the total computation time. Additional benefits of using this feature could include the reduction of new model development time where regions of non-importance can be treated as a rigidbody for faster turnaround time. This paper presents an overview of how the switching works in theory and how they can be invoked in LS-DYNA which is supported both in SMP and MPP versions for both implicit and explicit solvers.

The full article, which was originally published in the FEAINFORMATION newsletter can be downloaded here: Deformability Switching.pdf