Simulation “Pack” to Perform Design or Numerical Variable Studies

In an iterative simulation process, the main problem or difficulty is to use the existing results to understand its dependency on certain variables (design or just numerical). This difficulty, often causes us to rerun the simulations in a more controlled environment. Let me illustrate this with a simple problem in which we have some v1-v10…

December 10, 2007 | by

Tiebreak Example # 1

Here is one of the simplest set up of a tiebreak test problem that was developed earlier. You can test the tiebreak under any load case by simply including the appropriate included file. The main file is named “main.k”. tiebreak_example.tar Thanks to Brian Wainscott, LSTC, who was instrumental in helping to understand some important aspects…

November 20, 2007 | by

*DEFINE_CONTACT_VOLUME for *SET_{OPTION}_GENERAL

I am glad to announce that the latest version of LS-DYNA will support the use of *DEFINE_CONTACT_VOLUME in any *SET_{OPTION}_GENERAL keyword. As most of you know, *DEFINE_CONTACT_VOLUME offers many advantages over *DEFINE_BOX such as definition in a local system and multiple shapes such as sphere, ellipse, box, and cylinder. With this support, my earlier post…

November 19, 2007 | by

MIT Open Course Ware

Recently, I came across this MIT Open Course Ware and thought it might be useful for others as well. MIT has made more than 1800 courses available at no cost.

November 19, 2007 | by

Class Notes

Recently, I was teaching a class for Black & Decker, and one of the students, Kevin, was taking notes that I thought captured my lecture quite well. I asked him to provide a scanned copy which is included here for others who may find it helpful. notes.ppt

November 14, 2007 | by

2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference Summary By Sven Holcombe

Sven Holcombe of JARI sent us this great presentation summary that covers some of the paper presentation at the 2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference. Its has been a lot of work for Sven I am sure and its greatly appreciated for his effort. Thanks a lot, Sven. (I removed the preview since the loading time of…

November 9, 2007 | by

Membrane Thinning in Shell Elements

In 2D shell elements, the stress in the normal (fiber) direction is iteratively reduced to zero to meet the plane-stress condition. The strains are however nonzero in the fiber direction and will be linear though the thickness. Under membrane straining, LS-DYNA allows an option to account for the reduction in the shell thickness in the…

November 4, 2007 | by

Contact and Global Timestep

You may have seen this popular message that is printed out by LS-DYNA for every simulation. The LS-DYNA time step size should not exceed 0.456E-06 to avoid contact instabilities. If the step size is bigger then scale the penalty of the offending surface Lets review this to understand a little more. As we know, Explicit…

November 1, 2007 | by

Shell Element Stress and Strain Output to D3PLOT – A Brief Overview

A few questions recently from some users while teaching a class prompted me to write this overview regarding the data output, particularly for shell elements, into D3PLOT and how the post-processors plot them. The brief overview is listed in the form of list items for a quick read. 1. Element output are always element centered…

November 1, 2007 | by