Dear readers,
I have a big model with Tie constraints, contacts and springs. Model behaved nicely when the contacts were fixed, but the result didn’t of course correspond to reality. When I opened fixed joints and activated the contacts, model didn’t converge any more. It is too time consuming to activate them one by one, execution time is very long. To study the contacts I tried writing out .cel file and read it to CGX with command line “cgx_GLUT -c model.inp -read model.cel”. CGX opens fine, but I can’t activate and display any contacts, although there should be about ten non-convergent iterations. Unfortunately CGX manual doesn’t give any advice for this. Is there a recipe somewhere, how to get nice picture of contact’s displacements and forces in CGX? I asked CCX to write RF and U to node file, and it seems that .cel includes them. Usually I use PrePoMax with CCX, but it doesn’t support studuying contacts. Or at least I haven’t found a way to get the .cel file read into it. If there is, please give advice.
probably is too late, but maybe useful for others, p. 560 of the manual https://www.dhondt.de/ccx_2.22.pdf
Really, really helpful. NOTICE you have to open first the .frd file in ccx (not the inp)
Finally, the parameter CONTACT ELEMENTS stores the contact elements
which have been generated in each iteration in a file with the namejobname.cel.
When opening the frd file with CalculiX GraphiX these files can be read with
the command “read jobname.cel inp” and visualized by plotting the elements
in the sets contactelements_stα_inβ_atγ_itδ, where α is the step number, β the
increment number, γ the attempt number and δ the iteration number.