Create line-to-line contact
 

Hi.

I want to model contact between steel cables. To generate the cables I'm creating lines and then asigning them a circular cross section in the Design Modeller, which works fine.

The main problem is when I try to define contact pairs for the wires in the cable. I'm quite certain that one can create a contact surface for a line/edge object, defining a radius for the position of the surface around the line. The problem in that Mechanical won't accept my Contact and Target inputs as the lines which define each strand.

Is there a way that I could define this contacts through WB or maybe via a command line?

Cheers

I don't use Line Bodies myself, but if you cannot use a Contact could you instead put them in a Multi Body Part in DesignModeler, they will share the end node and not require a Contact.

I don't think that would work since I need to define a Frictional contact between the beams.

Sorry, I should have read your question properly. You are talking about the frictional contact between adjacent wires in the cable, this can be quite a complex interaction depending upon the loads. Is this for a static or transient FEA? What are your boundary conditions? You may have to use the explicit dynamics solver in Mechanical Enterprise (used to be called Explicit STR before Release 18.0), assuming you have the appropriate licence. There you can use body interactions; either frictional or frictionless. Explicit dynamics often has to be used for complex interaction simulations and can be set up for quasi-static cases.

I'm doing a static analysis (Static Structural). Currently I'm just defining full body geometries on AutoCAD and then importing them into ANSYS but I've read some papers which mention the analysis can be done using beam bodies, asigning a croos section to a line. I just can't manage to achieve that. The advantage is that the solution would take much less time (currently my models take about 4 days when I incorporate damage to some of the fibers).

This are helical steel cables, composed of helical wires: 1 straight core (aka first layer), 6 helical on the second layer and 12 in the third layer. I'm fixating the cables in one end and imposing an axial displacement in the other end (all this aplied to the faces of the cross-section).

I'll try using Explicit Dynamic.

Thanks for the reply.