Contact Penalty Stiffness for Shells A new algorithm is introduced to apply penalty stiffness for contact interactions of shells. This enhancement improves performance and accuracy for a large range of shell thickness ratios. Shell thickness ratio = shell thickness / characteristic length of shell The image shows the performance improvement for contact interactions depending on several shell thickness ratios. The force magnitude applied for each test case was adjusted for the different shell thickness/shell length ratios to maintain a small displacement range and similar maximum displacements across all test cases. shell thickness / shell length = 0.1 shell thickness / shell length = 0.05 shell thickness / shell length = 0.01 shell thickness / shell length = 0.001 The penalty stiffness applies to shell-to-shell, solid-to-shell, surface-to-surface, and edge-to-surface contact in linear static studies. Parent topicSOLIDWORKS Simulation
