Joins Parts.

Join all Parts.

Unjoin Parts.

Unjoin all Parts.

Define join Parts using a matrix.

Review which Parts are currently joined.

Enter the tolerance you want Autodyn to use in determining which nodes should be joined. Click the Set button to set this tolerance.

The default value for the join tolerance will take care of small round-off differences in node location and will give good results. The tolerance should not artificially be increased to try to join nodes with a clear offset with respect to each other.

Merges joined unstructured nodes into a single unstructured node.

Check this box to plot a symbol at every joined node.

Check this box to show which Parts are joined to a selected Part (a box appears to let you select a Part).

Selecting this option results in continuous contours across joined faces and also removes joined faces from other types of plots.

There is now an option to remove joined faces from rendered images under the Joins, Settings option. Selecting this option results in continuous contours across joined faces and also removed joined faces from other types of plots.

Bonded contact allows the nodes of an unstructured Part to be bonded to a face of another unstructured Part. Bonded contact alleviates the requirement that for joining purposes two nodes need to reside at the same physical location. The nodes that are to be bonded to a face may have an offset with respect to the face and the offset is a user-defined maximum physical normal distance of a node from a face which can be bonded together.

Bonded face connections can fail and break upon a user-defined stress criterion.

Spot welds generated in an Ansys Explicit Dynamics systems are transferred to the Autodyn system as beam elements filled with a rigid material.

Spot welds utilize the multi-body rigid material option where each spot weld acts as an individual rigid boy.

Spot welds can be defined as breakable by force:

Note that spot welds cannot be generated directly inside an Autodyn system. Spot welds should be defined in an Ansys Explicit Dynamics system and automatically transferred to a linked Autodyn system.

For each spot weld connections a multiple beam rigid body is automatically generated for each spot weld in the Ansys Explicit Dynamics system in order to guarantee the transfer of bending over the spot weld.

After failure of the spot weld the spot weld rigid body will be removed from the analysis model as can be seen above.

Within an Ansys Explicit Dynamics system an effective area can be input for spot welds, thus the breakable criteria can be defined in terms of stress. This stress is converted to force when transferred into Autodyn.

Spot welds of zero length are permitted. However, if such spot welds are defined as breakable the above failure is modified since local normal and shear directions cannot be defined. A modified criterion using global forces is used instead:

(13–2)

where dfx, dfy and dfz are the global force differences across the spot weld.