Reply To: Static Structural / Non-linear analysis / Equilibrium iterations count

[peteroznewman]

In Mechanical, under the Static Structural branch is the Analysis Settings. That is where you can change the number of Steps, turn on Auto Time Stepping, set the Initial, Minimum and Maximum Substeps and turn on Large Deflection.

Let's say you have a 1-step solution with Initial and Minimum Substeps of 10. If your model converged nicely at substep 5 then started bisections, note the time at substep 5, say it was 0.5 s and in the next run, change the 1-step solution into a 2-step solution.

Step 1 has an End Time that you wrote down from substep 5 say 0.5 s but you would change the Initial Substeps to 5 instead of 10 because it is only half as long. Step 2 has the original end time, likely 1.0 but use an Inital Substeps of 10 (which is half the time increment of the original run) if the orginal run had a single bisection then converged.  If the original run had 2 bisections then converged, use Initial Substeps of 20 in Step 2.  If the original run had 3 bisections, use Initial Substeps of 40 in Step 2.