Surface Contacts

In an assembly analyses, surface contacts have to be generated to perform a nonlinear contact analysis.

Location of the Contacts panel (Inventor):

To Automatically Generate Surface Contacts (Inventor Only):

Click Automatic in the Contacts panel of the Autodesk Nastran ribbon tab to automatically detect contact pairs throughout the model. No dialog appears, and the contact generation process begins immediately. A progress bar appears during automatic contact generation. A pop-up message appears if no contact pairs were discovered.

The contact type and tolerance are based on the specifications in the Options tab of the Analysis dialog. Set up the desired contact parameters before executing the Automatic command.

Automatic contact pairs appear under Surface Contacts in the Analysis branch of the model tree. They do not appear in the Model branch. Therefore, when using automatic contacts, you must execute the Automatic command for each analysis created in the current model.

Once detected, the In-CAD browser shows the names of the parts that are in contact.

To Manually Define Surface Contact Pairs:

There are two ways to access the Surface Contact dialog:

The following dialog opens. The appearance differs depending on whether you activate the Auto or Manual option within the dialog:

Auto mode:

Manual mode:

The Surface Contact form has the following main sections:

The other sections in this form vary sightly depending on the type of contact you select (Auto or Manual). Follow the links at the bottom of this page to see more info on the other sections available in the Surface Contacts form.

Manually defined contact pairs are added under the Surface Contacts node in the Model branch of the tree. If the following option is activated when you create a contact pair:

Add to Analysis

The contact pair is also included under Surface Contacts in the Analysis branch of the tree. Once a surface contact pair has been added to the Analysis branch of the tree, you can create new surface contacts to the analysis (via the context menu) without going to the Model branch.

Surface contacts can be dragged and dropped or copied and pasted from the Model branch of the Autodesk Nastran Model Tree into the Analysis branch.

The context menu for surface contacts depends on which entity you right-click (the Surface Contacts group heading, an automatically generated contact pair, or a manually specified contact pair):

These context menu commands are summarized in the following list:

You can select and edit multiple surface contacts at the same time by using a ‘group-edit’ feature. You can change the common properties once, and the changes get applied to all selected contacts. You do not need to edit each contact pair individually, as long as the settings being revised are common to all selected pairs.