Bonding Interactions for Shells

The enforcement of bonding interactions between sets of shell elements that have a physical gap is more robust.

The image above shows a model with three shell surfaces. One pair of shells has a physical gap of 1mm, while the second pair of shells has a gap of 1.1mm. By setting a user-defined Maximum gap for bonding to 1mm (the maximum gap between geometric entities to enforce local bonding interactions), only the pair of shells with a gap of 1mm should be bonded.

An improved algorithm enforces the proper bonding interactions irrespective of the mesh size. In previous releases, if you applied a coarse shell mesh to the three surfaces, the algorithm erroneously enforced a bonding interaction to the second shell pair with a 1.1mm gap.