Translating an Abaqus Substructure to a Simpack Flexible Body

The following procedure summarizes the typical usage of the abaqus tosimpack translator:

1. Create an Abaqus substructure. (General guidelines for building Abaqus models with substructures are described in Using Substructures.)

   The substructure generation step must write at least the mass and stiffness matrices. It can also write the recovery, viscous damping, and structural damping matrices. The FLEXIBLE BODY option must be used. For example,

   SUBSTRUCTURE GENERATE, MASS MATRIX=YES, RECOVERY MATRIX=YES, VISCOUS DAMPING MATRIX=YES, 
   STRUCTURAL DAMPING MATRIX=YES
   FLEXIBLE BODY, TYPE=SIMPACK

   In addition, you can add the following data to translate stress:

   ELEMENT RECOVERY MATRIX, POSITION=AVERAGED AT NODES
   S,

   You can recover results on a subset of the model using the ELSET parameter for the substructure generation and element recovery matrix options shown above.

   The Simpack FBI file is always in SI units. If the Abaqus analysis does not use SI units (meters, kilograms, and seconds), you can define the model units using the UNIT SYSTEM option. Alternatively, you can define the model units when you run the translator using the length, mass, and time command line options. If the Abaqus analysis uses American or English units (inches, pounds force, and seconds), the mass unit is slinch.

2. Run the Abaqus analysis.

3. Run the abaqus tosimpack translator to read the substructure SIM database produced by the analysis and to create the flexible body interface file.