Free body cuts display the resultant forces and moments
transmitted across a selected surface of your model.
Free body cuts simply integrate the internal forces in an element
over a section; therefore, they cannot be used accurately across sections
containing surface tractions due to cohesive contact or other sources. The
Free Body toolset
is available only in
the Visualization module,
and you can create a free body cut only when the current step and frame of the
output database includes element force nodal output
(NFORC).
This chapter explains how to use the
Free Body toolset
to create and delete free body cuts, display or hide them in the viewport, and
customize several aspects of their appearance.
Abaqus/CAE
provides two other methods for displaying free body data:
You can display resultant forces and moments along an arbitrary plane
through your model by toggling on free body display for a planar view cut. For
more information, see
Understanding view cuts.
You can display the free body nodal forces in a symbol plot to
determine which nodes have an imbalance of forces or moments due to applied
loads or to visualize the nodal force distribution on internal sections. For
more information, see
Producing a symbol plot of free body nodal forces.