SSA Blog

Merry Christmas everyone. If you are reading this, I assume you haven’t just stumbled across it, and have been lead here either from an SSA email or some form of content feed. If that’s the case, I’m sure you’ve also seen the SSA Christmas newsletter which includes the traditional SSA festive message set against the backdrop of some virtual bells chiming.

As I have stated before contact is everywhere. (And I still wonder why the real world finds it simple to handle, whereas in the simulation domain its always a bit tricky.) But this time I want to move on from simple contact, if such a thing exists, to the sort of contact which occurs when a projectile penetrates a target.

Following on from Laurence’s post on new features in Abaqus 2017, the latest release has some interesting new keywords that are really useful for process simulation of Additive Manufacturing (AM). Using Element Progressive Activation and a subroutine the user can switch elements on and off at specific times in an analysis. This procedure is available for both Heat Transfer and Static stress analysis, providing a capability to predict residual stresses from thermal AM processes.