Learning Forum

[Puneeth Bagaria]

Hello Fady,

There are two aspects of dealing with beam and solid element contacts. 

1) Node of beams contacting against the surface of solid elements: You can use any node-segment contact for this purpose. *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_NODES_TO_SURFACE or *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_SINGLE_SURFACE for example.

2) Beam vs edges of the solid elements: An edge to egde contact is required here. This can be enabled by using SOFT=2 (DEPTH=5) in *CONTACT or by using a seperate *CONTACT_AUTOMATIC_GENERAL defined only on the edges + beam elements.

Please refer to the below resources for more information: 

Contact Modeling in LS-DYNA — Welcome to the LS-DYNA support site

Contact between Beam and Shell Elements — Welcome to the LS-DYNA support site

Regarding the section formulations available for beam elements:  Please refer to *SECTION_SHELL of LS-DYNA keyword manual vol-1.

Regards

Puneeth