Learning Forum

[Rowan Timoffee-Maberly]

Hello!
I have two tools that are being pressed togetehr with a section of steel in between.
The steel in between deforms as the tools are pressed to leave a notch in the steel.
I am trying to perform analysis to see how much the tools themselves deflect as the notch is made.
However my convergence keeps failing at the moment and when I take a look at the dispalcement at failure some of the mesh elements are sticking out as seen in this picture:

The tools press into the steel and some elements just go crazy after a very long running soloution.
Here is a cross section of the tools with some displacement.

you can see that it starts defomorming the way I would expect, but after many hours of solving it errors out.

The steel in between the tools is setup with frictional contact.

The male tool is moved into the female tool with a translational joint displacement. 
the disatance is applied over 10 different steps

Each step is set as 50 initial/minimum 1000 maximum substepos
If there is any advice that would be very helpful so im not trying to make small changes and run the entire soloution again for it to keep failing. 

[Chris Quan]

First of all, you need to insert a Contact Tool under Solution in Tree to find out how large the maximum frictional stress is. If it is very large, you need to use the MAPDL command rmodif to limit the maximum frictional stress to a realistic value.

Since the deformation is quite large during compression, you may consider using Nonlinear Adaptive Meshing (NLAD) to re-mesh the deformed region and avoid element violation errors. 

For the material steel, is plasticity included in its material model? If not, you need to add plasticity such as initial yield stress and hardening modulus to obtain more realistic material behavior of steel.