Contact Surface Generation for Solid Elements

By default, when a solid part ID is included in a contact slave or master part set, LS-DYNA generates a segment list for only the outer skin of the solid element volume. This is truly only if the slave or master set type is a segment list since for a node slave or master list,…

August 23, 2007 | by

Consolidating Multiple Contact Definitions to a Single Contact

Over the last few years, the simplicity of defining a global AUTOMATIC_SINGLE_SURFACE contact to treat the interactions between multiple parts of varying stiffnesses and element types has changed the way we model contact interfaces. They are not only simple to define but also promote better modeling since they hugely eliminate the need to manually identify…

August 23, 2007 | by

Principal Stress Calculator for Shell Elements in DYNAIN File

Recently, there was a request to ouput the principal stresses for each element at lower and upper surfaces of each shell element in DYNAIN file to use in some failure theories. I beleive this feature is a routine output in PamStamp simulations. To enable this, the attached ‘C’ code can be used that reads in…

August 1, 2007 | by

Smoothing Length in SPH

Update James Kennedy reported a minor print error with regards to default smoothing length calculation. This has been corrected. Thanks James. In Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), the particles not only pocess time-history variables such as density, displacement, velocity, acceleration, strrain-rate, stress-rate, etc but they also act as interpolation points. The space and time dependent variable…

May 31, 2007 | by

Viscous Damping Coefficient (VDC) in SPH Contact

Viscous Daming Coefficient (VDC) is freqeuntly used in contact interface definitions (*CONTACT) to damp out oscillations normal to the contact segment. It is specified in percentage of the critical damping where a value of 90 is 90% of critical damping. In one recent applications using SPH for gravity initialization of a filled fluid container, using…

May 30, 2007 | by

Interface Binary Output for Single Surface Contact

When requesting interface binary file, which consists of a number of useful data such as pressure/friction_energy, etc that can be contour plotted, LS-DYNA by default outputs these variables for ALL segments included in the SINGLE SURFACE contact. Visualizing the output can be tedious since it involves recursive blanking to expose the inner regions of interest…

May 29, 2007 | by

True Total Strain to Effective Plastic Strain

While converting true-stress vs true-strain curve into effective stress vs effective plastic strain, the removal of elastic strains can be based on a constant or varying strain value. For relatively small hardening, both methods should yield identical plastic strains but significant hardening, using an instantaneous elastic strain as opposed to a constant elastic strain is…

May 29, 2007 | by

Speeding up numerical studies using Discrete Optimization in LS-OPT

In an earlier post on simulation based product design we saw that in many cases a large portion of effort early on in the design cycle is usually spent on determining the best practices to simulate a physical event. We can speed up such simulations by the discrete variable support in LS-OPT version 3.1. An…

April 30, 2007 | by