mjmiddle
Ansys Employee

CONTA174 has TASS and TASR for sliding in contact R and S directions. See the following command snippet. It's probably not the best way since I did an arithmetic average to get an element value. R and S directions can be different for every contact element:

! Turn on "Analysis Settings > Output Controls > Contact miscellaneous"
! "contact_results" should be a named selection containing "contact" faces not target faces.
! nonlinear contacts will only have contacting area where status is sliding or sticking
! sliding and sticking regions will also have nonzero contact pressure.
! This snippet gets values at nodes (might be averaged from element centroid). It then averages by just adding the 4 nodes and dividing by 4.
! The pletab then averages element values to nodes for contour display.  There is probably a better way than all this averaging.
! Maybe just put nodal values to a nodal result quantity: *VPUT, then use a User Defined Result to plot that result quantity
! You could alternatively just plot a user defined result in Mechanical, such as CONTNMISC17 to get R direction sliding on only I nodes (no averaging for connected elements).

/post1
cmsel,s,contact_results               ! contact_results should be a named selection containing contact faces (1 side)
esln,s,1,active                       ! contact elements will not be in a component so select attached elements
set,last
etable,sta,cont,stat                  ! It also gets inactive contact side from the symmetric contacts, so get status
esel,u,etab,sta,0,0                   ! remove elements with contact status = 0, which is for inactive and far open
etable,eras                           ! erase entire etable to clear data from possible previous calls to etable command
esel,r,enam,,174                      ! may need to elliminate any other connected types, such as beams, mpc184
                                      ! If selecting all contacts, use esel,s,enam,,174 and delete previous commands through cmsel
                                      ! can also just get contact using a command snippet under the contact, mcid = cid, then use esel,s,type,,mcid under Solution

! sliding distance in S direction
*do,i,1,4
  etable,sslide%i%,nmisc,i+20         ! etable sequence numbers for tass at each node 21,22,23,24 (I,J,K,L)
*enddo
sadd,temp1,sslide1,sslide2
sadd,temp2,sslide3,sslide4
sadd,sslidet,temp1,temp2
smult,sslide,sslidet,,0.25

! sliding distance in R direction
*do,i,1,4
  etable,rslide%i%,nmisc,i+16         ! etable sequence numbers for tasr at each node 17,18,19,20 (I,J,K,L)
*enddo
sadd,temp1,rslide1,rslide2
sadd,temp2,rslide3,rslide4
sadd,rslidet,temp1,temp2
smult,rslide,rslidet,,0.25

/view,1,1,1,1                         ! Set isometric view
/ang,1
/auto,1                               ! fit to screen
/show,png
pldisp,1                              ! display both displaced and undisplaced model. use /PLOPTS for other contour display options
pletab,sslide,avg
pletab,rslide,avg
! need to show coordinate system and undeformed model