How can I handle contact between beams and shells?
In general, *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_SINGLE_SURFACE
, *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_GENERAL
or
*CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_NODES_TO_SURFACE
should handle a
beam-to-shell-surface contact situation. All of these contact types
take into account thickness offsets. By this I mean that the contact
surface is offset from the shell midplane by half the shell thickness
and offset from the beam centerline by a radius of the beam's
equivalent circular cross-section. Of course, the contact thickness can
be modified by the user on card 3 of *CONTACT_
or by using *PART_CONTACT
instead of *PART
.
The first two contact types mentioned above are single surface contacts
and so both the shell and beams parts should be included on the slave
side with the master side being null.
For an *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_NODES_TO_SURFACE
contact, the
beam part (or its nodes) should be slave, the shell part (or its
segments) should be master. For any of the above, the search for
penetration is made between beam nodes (or more precisely, a sphere
around each beam node) and shell surfaces.
If your contact situation is beam-to-shell-EDGE, you might have a problem.
In that case, you may have to stick with *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_GENERAL
and
add null beams (low density beams utilizing *MAT_NULL
) along (merged to) the outer edges of your shells. The null beam part should be added to the slave side of the contact.