Reply To: Contact stiffness

[Chandra Sekaran]

You can define contact stiffness/TCC as funciton of location by adding APDL commands. You will need to use 'table' arrays to do so. You can read up on 'table' arrays in section 3.10 (3.10.3) of the APDL guide at https://ansyshelp.ansys.com/account/secured?returnurl=/Views/Secured/corp/v241/en/ans_apdl/Hlp_P_APDL3_11.html . Here is a sample APDL command snippet that can be inserted under the specific contact region in Mechanical to set this type of table. Please refer to the MAPDL elements reference guide under contact174 element for the real constant numbers.

! tcc is a function of X and Z coordinates. TCC is defined for 3 values of X and 2 values of Z

! The X and Z values must be in ascending order. You must fill all 6 cells (3x2) with TCC values

*dim,tcc_vs_xz,table,3,2,1,x,z   

! 0th column is X values. 0th row is Z values. Fill these first

tcc_vs_xz(1,0)= 0                ! x coordinates
tcc_vs_xz(2,0)=2.5
tcc_vs_xz(3,0)=7.0              

tcc_vs_xz(0,1)=5.5              ! z coordinates
tcc_vs_xz(0,2)=9.75  

! fill the cells with TCC values
tcc_vs_xz(1,1)= 2000
tcc_vs_xz(1,2)= 5000
tcc_vs_xz(2,1)= 20000
tcc_vs_xz(2,2)= 9000
tcc_vs_xz(3,1)= 7500
tcc_vs_xz(3,2)= 6000

rmod,cid,14,%tcc_vs_xz%      ! modify 14th real constant of contact174 element (which is TCC) to use the table