51.8. Recommendations

The following points are important for beam-to-beam contact modeling.

  • Use pipe elements (PIPE289) to model polymer tube structures as line bodies. Currently, none of the hyperelastic material models can be modeled by beam elements (BEAM188, BEAM189).

  • When internal beam contact is involved, set KEYOPT(3) = 2 for the contact elements to capture any internal crossing and parallel beam-to-beam contact. In this example, the crossing contact type dominates between the coil and the tube; the parallel contact type may potentially occur during New-Raphson iterations.

  • Set KEYOPT(14) = 2 for the contact elements to allow each contact detection point to interact with multiple target segments simultaneously.