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There is a list of features that trigger Newton-Raphson iterations (i.e., a nonlinear solution), but having any contact elements (even if bonded) will trigger NR iterations. (The other things that trigger NR iterations – plasticity, nonlinear springs, etc. – are usually more obvious.) What we do in Workbench Mechanical is to use the following command to force a single iteration:neqit,1,force With this, one will see the following warning printed: *** WARNING *** CP = 2.090 TIME= 12:09:08 Using 1 iteration per substep may result in unconverged solutions for nonlinear analysis and the program may not indicate divergence in this case. Check your results. What this warning is saying is: if the analysis is truly linear (i.e., small deflection theory), you should have force balance; if the analysis is actually nonlinear, you won’t get force balance. Now, let’s say the analysis was solved as a ‘linear’ analysis, but large deflection effects should have been turned on – we wouldn’t know this, either, since a ‘linear’ analysis doesn’t use NR method. Hence, by specifying “neqit,1,force”, we are saying that we believe that it’s a linear analysis, and we are forcing that assumption on the solver.If you want to be safe, then use 1 substep (NSUBST,1,1,1), but this may require multiple equilibrium iterations. If it’s linear, it should converge quickly (e.g., 2-3 iterations), and one will be ensured of numerically accurate results.If one is confident that the analysis should be run as linear, then use 1 equilibrium iteration (NSUBST,1,1,1 with NEQIT,1,FORCE) and there will not be any additional checks, but the solution will really just be 1 iteration, like a linear analysis.