Reply To: How to output contact forces data points equal to number of deformation data points?

[Chris Quan]

The Output Contact Force creates .cfr files that include contact force at all nodes that are in contacts. It is not related to the time history plot of contact force under Solution Information. Furthermore, these .cfr files cannot be processed directly inside Mechanical GUI at the current release.
If you open the .cfr files using a text editor, you will see the nodal number in the first line and the second line lists three contact forces in X, Y, Z directions. You may use spreadsheet to organize these data and re-arrange them to get two columns of data (cycle number and contact forces) for each contact node. Please be aware that not all nodes in your model are participated in the contact calculation. Only a small portion of the nodes are involved.
You can also look at the admodel.log in the MECH folder of your project to associate the cycle number with time. From these information, you can plot time history of contact force at the selected contact nodes.
If you want to plot the relation of contact force vs deformation, you can create a new results tracker of directional deformation under Solution Information. By doing this, you can make sure that both contact force and deformation have the same number of data points and are corresponding to the same time increment.
You need to be aware that the contact force results tracker is scope to a body or multiple bodies while deformation results tracker is scoped to a vertex or a node. So make sure you select the vertex/node strategically so the deformation from the results tracker can be properly related to the contact force results tracker.