How to avoid the penetration in abaqus....

Hi,

 Since you're getting penetration during contact, I should assume that you're using soft contact modeling (i.e. by defining contact stiffness). If this is the case, then penetration can not be avoided due to master-slave algorithm. However you can try few things: (1) mesh refinement, (2) increasing the contact stiffness (my personal recommendation would be not to exceed 1000-10000 times the underlying element stiffness; just order of magnitude), (3) symmetric contact modeling (i.e., defining two contacts between any pair of surface by switching the master-slave definition (this is computationally costly but it does reduce the amount of penetration most of the time), (4) adaptive meshing (least recommended). However, note that once the penetration goes beyond certain fraction of underlying element length, Abaqus will issue overclosure warning. So, if penetration is small, you can safely ignore it :) (afterall it's approximation).

Kumar

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The world started with 0, is progressing with 0, but doesn't want 0.