{"id":456623,"date":"2026-04-17T17:13:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/forums\/topic\/modelling-variable-stiffness-of-contacts\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T17:13:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:13:44","slug":"modelling-variable-stiffness-of-contacts","status":"publish","type":"topic","link":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/forums\/topic\/modelling-variable-stiffness-of-contacts\/","title":{"rendered":"Modelling Variable Stiffness of Contacts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;Hello everyone,&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;I&rsquo;m currently looking into ways one could implement a contact stiffness that depends on the &lt;em style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;local<\/em> contact pressure. Ideally this would be part of the contact formulation itself, but I&rsquo;d also be open to approaches where this is handled through the material model or some kind of user\u2011defined behaviour.&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;Let&rsquo;s assume we already know a function for the stiffness, for example &lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;k(p) = b &middot; p&lt;\/span&gt;, with &lt;em style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;b<\/em> being some factor obtained beforehand. It could also be nonlinear, that&rsquo;s not the main point.&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;I think this could be quite interesting for certain contact problems where the pressure distribution is computed anyway, and where small additional deformations have a noticeable influence on the macroscopic stress state of the parts in contact. At the same time, one wouldn&rsquo;t need to explicitly model the microscopic behaviour that actually governs the real contact stiffness, since that part could be calculated separately and then condensed into such an effective stiffness law.&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;Does anyone know if there are ways to implement something like this? My experience with such custom implementations in ANSYS Workbench, MAPDL or pyMAPDL is still pretty limited, so any hints or examples would be greatly appreciated.&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;span style=&#8221;white-space: pre-wrap;&#8221;&gt;Many thanks!&lt;\/span&gt;&lt;\/p&gt;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-456623","topic","type-topic","status-publish","hentry","topic-tag-contact","topic-tag-stiffness","topic-tag-submodeling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"acf":[],"custom_fields":[{"0":{"_bbp_forum_id":["27791"],"_bbp_topic_id":["456623"],"_bbp_subscription":["637099","58821"],"_bbp_author_ip":["2001:638:a000:6301::63"],"_bbp_last_reply_id":["456624"],"_bbp_last_active_id":["456624"],"_bbp_last_active_time":["2026-04-17 18:28:13"],"_bbp_reply_count":["1"],"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":["0"],"_bbp_voice_count":["2"],"_bbp_engagement":["637099","58821"],"_btv_view_count":["35"],"_bbp_topic_status":["unanswered"]},"test":"bauermfk-fau-de"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics\/456623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/topic"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics\/456623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationspace.ansys.com\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}