Identifying Necking in Metals and Plastics

When characterizing materials such as Metals and Plastics in LS-DYNA, most constitutive models provide a yield criteria that accounts for a 3D state of stress which reduces to a uniaxial yield stress in 1D. This allows us to directly input the true stress-strain curve from a one-dimensional state of stress testing such as in uniaxial…

January 16, 2007 | by

Speeding up Simulations for Focused Studies

In several situations, simulation models (new or inherited), are quite often burderend with several expensive features that may have negligible effect on the response that is purely used for comparative numerical studies. When a large portion of any simulation model turnaround time consists of features that are irrelavant to the focued study, it is imperative…

December 22, 2006 | by

Initial Penetrations in Contact Interfaces

1. Introduction Contact definitions allow the modeling of interaction between one or more parts in a simulation model and have become a necessity in any small or large deformation problem. The main objective of the contact interfaces is to eliminate any “overlapâ€? or “penetrationâ€? between the interacting surfaces and they accomplish this by first detecting…

December 20, 2006 | by

Prescribing Motion to a Rigidbody with Respect to a Local System

LS-DYNA offers several ways to prescribe a motion to a rigidbody using *BOUNDARY_PRESCRIBED_MOTION keyword. To prescribe a motion to a rigidbody along a local coordinate system, LS-DYNA offers two method to accomplish this. To demonstrate the differences in these two methods, we will consider a rigidbody that has initial rotational velocity and a prescribed displacement.…

December 19, 2006 | by

Deformable Spotwelds in LS-DYNA

Over the years, spotweld representation for crash and NVH applications have evolved from a crude to a detailed modeling resulting in reduced pre-processing effort while greatly enhancing the accuracy of numerical models. Here is link that gives a brief overview of spotwelding process in LS-DYNA. Please note that the document is over 2 years old…

December 16, 2006 | by

Modeling Press-Fit Conditions to Include Initial Stresses

In many designs, parts are often press-fitted as part of an assembly which causes an initial stress condition that is important to consider in simulations. To induce initial stresses that occur in such press-fit conditions, one can either linearly/non-linearly scale the overlap (penetration) or the contact stiffness over a certain interval depending on the following…

December 6, 2006 | by

Full-Newton and Quasi-Newton Iterative Schemes

When running problems using Implicit solution sheme in LS-DYNA, the default iterative non-linear solver used is the BFGS method that employs a ‘Quasi-Newton’ method in which the global stiffness matrix is reformed only every ILIMIT steps and in between these a relatively inexpensive update to the stiffness matrix is performed. This default stiffness matrix update…

December 5, 2006 | by

Monitoring Incremental Elapsed Time as a Function of Simulation Time

When running explicit simulations in LS-DYNA, it is very important to understand the total CPU clock and the total Elapsed time used by the solver. This information is available at the bottom of every D3HSP file written by LS-DYNA as shown below. The total elapsed time reported in the file is the difference between the…

December 5, 2006 | by

Damping for Airbags

When simulating airbag deployment, using the classical uniform-pressure (CONTROL VOLUME) or non-uniform-pressure (ALE, Particle), users frequently encounter oscillations. These oscillations are generally categorized as local and global. To reduce both forms of oscillations, LS-DYNA provides two types of damping that are briefly discussed here. 1. Mass-Weighted-Damping The parameter MWD in *AIRBAG_{OPTION} keyword provides a means…

November 22, 2006 | by

General Guidelines for Crash Analysis in LS-DYNA

LS-DYNA is a general purpose finite element software and is designed for use in various applications. Based on the use of the software for a specific application, LS-DYNA offers several parameters that can be changed from their default values to improve the accuracy, robustness, and stability of the simulation. For performing crash analysis using LS-DYNA,…

November 1, 2006 | by