Reply To: How to Retrieve Contact Area as Elemental Values in Ansys Mechanical?

[hugo.hennion]

Hello Deepak,

 

Thank you for your response and the updated version of the script! I really appreciate the time you took to help me refine this.

 

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you; I wanted to ensure I had a thorough understanding before replying. I conducted a detailed investigation to isolate the behavior, and I set up a simplified model with just two CONTA174 elements and two TARGE170 elements that are not fully overlapping. This way, the contact area is intentionally not equal to the combined area of the CONTA174 elements. (in the screenshot below there is only the element faces of 2 TET10 elements that are selected for the Contact and Target Bodies)

Using the latest version of your script, I summed up all the CONT_AREA values in the ETABLE. Interestingly, this total doesn't match the Tracker Contacting Area value. Instead, it almost exactly matches the combined area of the CONTA174 elements when calculated directly from the LOC_DEF User Defined Results.

 

This has led me to believe that CONT_AREA from ETABLE might represent the area attributed to CONTA174 elements specifically, rather than the actual area of contact as shown by the Tracker.

 

Thanks again for the support, and I’d be very interested in hearing any further insights you might have on this!