Creating Rigid Connection Properties

A rigid connection property is the link between two part bodies that are stiffened and fastened together at their common boundary and behave as if their interface were infinitely rigid. Since part bodies can be meshed independently, rigid connection properties are designed to handle incompatible meshes.

Rigid connection properties do not take into account the elastic deformability of the interfaces.

A rigid connection property is defined in terms of the two surfaces that may interact, called a contact pair. These surfaces are indicated through the definition of a general analysis connection. The general analysis connection can connect a point, edge, or face to a point, edge, or face. Table 6–5 summarizes the connections that can be used to define a rigid connection in Abaqus for CATIA V5.

Table 6–5 Rigid connection properties.

Assembly Design WorkbenchAbaqus for CATIA V5
Coincidence ConstraintContact ConstraintGeneral Analysis Connection
  

You can request history output of relative displacements and rotations and of total, elastic, viscous, and reaction forces and moments from a rigid connection property. The support for the history output request is the connection mesh.

This task shows you how to create a rigid connection property between two parts.

  1. Click the Rigid Connection Property icon .

    The Rigid Connection Property dialog box appears, and a Rigid Connection Property object appears in the specification tree under the Properties objects set.

  2. You can change the identifier of the rigid connection property by editing the Name field.

  3. In the specification tree, select a general analysis connection created previously in Abaqus for CATIA V5.

    The Supports field is updated to reflect your selection.

  4. By default, rigid connection properties constrain all degrees of freedom and are associated with the global, rectangular Cartesian axis system. To change the default behavior, click Transmitted Degrees of Freedom and do the following:

    1. Toggle off the degrees of freedom from which you want to remove the rigid connection property.

    2. Specify a local coordinate system for the degrees of freedom. Local coordinate systems are defined in the CATIA Part Design workbench.

  5. Click OK in the Rigid Connection Property dialog box.

    A symbol representing the rigid connection property appears on the corresponding faces.