Creating suppressed interactions and constraints

In certain situations you may not be certain about the necessity of certain contact pair candidates. You can delete such candidates from the contact pair candidates table and avoid creating interactions for them, but you may later have to go back and recreate them if they prove necessary. To address these situations, the contact detection tool offers the option to create interactions and constraints that are suppressed initially. Suppressed interactions and constraints are fully defined, but Abaqus ignores them when writing an input file or performing an analysis. A simple procedure activates these interactions and constraints and, thus, reintroduces them to the model definition (see Suppressing and resuming objects, for details).

There are two ways to create an initially suppressed contact pair:

  • Click mouse button 3 anywhere in the row for the appropriate contact pair, and select Suppress from the menu that appears. The background of the row for the contact pair changes to gray, indicating that the created interaction or constraint will be suppressed initially. To return the contact pair to active status, click mouse button 3 on the appropriate row and select Resume from the menu that appears.

  • Click the cell in the Suppression column for the appropriate contact pair. Click the cell again to return the contact pair to active status.

    Note:

    The Suppression column is not displayed by default. See Configuring the layout of the contact pair candidates table, for instructions on adding this column to the table.

    A green check mark in the Suppression cell indicates that the created interaction or constraint is active. A red “X” in this cell indicates that the created interaction or constraint is suppressed initially.