You can create bonded contact between non-touching edges of shell bodies.
When the software extracts the mid-surfaces of sheet metals (or solid parts that are treated as shells) to create shell bodies, a gap can be formed between the edges of adjacent shell bodies. You can create a bonded contact set definition between the non-touching shell edges. The bonding formulation is incompatible; the nodes of the shell edges participating in the bonded contact are not merged.
In the Contact Sets PropertyManager, select the first set of shell edges for Set1 and the second set of shell edges for Set2.
You can also select a face that corresponds to the thickness of the shell.
In a contact visualization plot, the shell edges that are part of the bonded contact definition are shown in red.
With the support of edge-to-edge incompatible bonding for shells, you can create cut boundaries for sub-modeling studies at the locations where shell edges are bonded.