At this year’s SIMULIA Community Conference, Dassault Systèmes described a series of advancements to the Abaqus software in terms of geometry, meshing, materials and solver performance.

“There are too many highlights to pick from,” joked Sumanth Kumar, vice president of SIMULIA Growth at Dassault Systèmes. “The ones that are critical are enhancements to the core technology of Abaqus.”

Eric Weybrant, product manager at Dassault Systèmes, expanded on the Abaqus improvements. “Enhancements to our general contact capability in Abaqus is a key. We also have new element types for multiphysics, which are becoming increasingly more important. New elements and material types and smooth particle hydrodynamics techniques will help modeling multiphysics,” he said.

Abaqus 2016 Contact Updates for Geometry

Contact modeling is very important when setting up your geometry for FEA analysis. It allows engineers to define the interactions between geometry parts. It should therefore come as little surprise that SIMULIA opened their product updates with their improved general contact technology, which can now transition automatically between contact types.

Weybrant explains that the goal is to make general contact more “natural” within Abaqus. “The users should not have to think about a contact. They should focus on the physics and the results. We focus on all the numerical details,” he said.

General contact is based on surface-to-surface formulations instead of node-to-surface algorithms seen with contact pairs. Weybrant says that this will reduce the amount of mesh dependencies when setting up a simulation. Currently, this general contact has expanded to include edge-to-surface and edge-to-edge.

The new release advances general contacts with the addition of vertices and automatic transitions between the contact types. This will allow for simulations like a spinning top. As the top spins, it will involve a vertex-to-surface contact. As the top falls, it will turn into an edge-to-surface contact, and eventually a surface-to-surface contact.

“I like the contact algorithms,” said Alan Mueller, chief technology officer at CD-adapco, a SIMULIA partner. “What I see SIMULIA doing is introducing contact generalities: an edge-to-face and point-to-face. Having written contact algorithms myself, I was impressed.”

Kumar, on the other hand, was proud of the new CAD-enhanced contacts. He explained, “You are able to get the contact pressures directly from the CAD in an approximated finite element geometry. This increases the accuracy of contact pressure and many other contact outputs.”

Other contact improvements in Abaqus include:

Model instancing for subassemblies connector and contact interactions
Edges to be involved in multiple general contacts
CDisp family, CTANDIR, CSTATUS, slip rate output variables added to Abaqus Explicit
Linearized contact when the only source of non-linearity is a frictionless sliding contacts
CAD-enhanced contact correction technique extended to general surface shapes

Abaqus 2016 Element and Material Library

Once the geometry is defined, users must get to meshing. Following this workflow, SIMULIA next announced the addition of pyramid elements for meshing. Weybrant mentioned that the pyramid element has been requested by customers for some time. It is compatible with Abaqus’ tetrahedral and hexagonal meshes and is commonly used in stress analysis.

SIMULIA also added an element for 1D fluid flow. This element is based on Bernoulli’s equation and is used for pipe/connectors for steady-state incompressible fluid flows. Using this element, engineers can assess the pressure, flow rates, gravity loadings and losses from friction and joints.

The 1D fluid flow element is compatible with 3D pore pressure elements. Using these elements in conjunction, Weybrant explained that fluid crack formations can be assessed.

According to a CFD expert present at the event, there are still some areas in CFD where other CAE software has improved functionality compared to Abaqus, such as trim meshes, general polyhedron and prism layers for the boundary layer. To meet that need, Dassault Systèmes and CD-adapco have partnered to improve the communication between their respective FEA and CFD software. This led to previous speculations of STAR-CCM+ joining the 3DEXPERIENCE.

Once meshed, engineers will need to define their materials. Abaqus has added a few new materials types into their library including nonlinear kinematic hardening plasticity, orthotropic clay plasticity and Johnson-Cook plasticity.

“When it comes to materials, we have introduced many of the materials that helps in geo-mechanics capabilities, industrial engineering applications,” noted Kumar. “So our material library has got a lot stronger with the release.”

Other element and material improvements in Abaqus include:

Coupled temperature displacement elements
Coupled pore pressure elements
Coupled pore pressure temperature elements
Rigid body rotation of tied surfaces without mesh offset adjustments
Cohesive elements in meshing edit tool

AMS Solver Performance Improved with GPU Acceleration

Now that the model is set up, the next step is to look at the solver. For the 2016 Abaqus release, SIMULIA focused on accelerating their solvers with GPU. Specifically, this release accelerates AMS linear dynamic procedures, frequency response and Eigenvalue calculations.

The SIMULIA team has also expanded the use of GPU into steady-state dynamics simulations. “The reason this procedure works so well with GPU is because it is a series of matrix multiplications, which is ideally suited for GPU,” said Weybrant.

SIMLUIA is still looking for beta testers for the 2016 release. If you are interested, contact your providers or visit www.3ds.com/slc.

Other Abaqus solver and performance improvements include:

Introduction of tracer particles to CEL simulations for material point results
DEM particle integration from boundaries and inlets
Distribution of particle sizes in DEM simulations
DEM particle interactions (mixing with and without adhesion)
Improvements of SPH boundary results and particle generations
Copy/paste issue in CAE corrected
Default font and glyph more visible
Min/max location moves as model is cut away in the viewport
Nodal coordinates as x/y values