Triangular, tetrahedral, and wedge elements

The library of solid elements in Abaqus includes first- and second-order triangles, tetrahedra, and wedge elements for planar, axisymmetric, and three-dimensional analysis.

This page discusses:

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Solid (Continuum) Elements

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Hybrid versions of these elements are provided for use with incompressible and nearly incompressible constitutive models (see Hybrid incompressible solid element formulation for a detailed discussion of the formulation used). However, these hybrid forms should be used only to fill in regions in meshes made of brick elements; otherwise, too many constraint variables may be introduced.

Second-order tetrahedra are not suitable for the analysis of contact problems: a constant pressure on an element face produces zero equivalent loads at the corner nodes. In contact problems this makes the contact condition at the corners indeterminate, with failure of the solution likely because of excessive gap chatter. The same argument holds true for contact on triangular faces of a wedge element.