Reply To: Help with insufficient supports for a Hirth joint analysis

[peteroznewman]

Whenever you use a frictional or frictionless contact, it is important to insert a Contact Tool under the Connections folder.  Then Generate Initial Contact Status.  Look in the worksheet to see if the contact is Closed. If it is Near Open or Far Open, that can cause the problems you are seeing.  The corective action is to make sure the contact is closed. One method to do that is to insert a geometric treatment on the contact which is Adjust to Touch.  This moves the contact elements so that they become initially closed.

You may also need to change the Analysis Settings to turn on Automatic Time Stepping and to set the Initial and Minimum Substeps to 10 or higher and to turn on Large Deflection.