You use a Remote Point as a scoping mechanism for remote boundary conditions. Remote points are a way of abstracting a connection to a solid model, be it a vertex, edge, face, body, node, or element face to a point in space (specified by the Location property). The solver uses multipoint constraint (MPC) equations to make these connections.
The following sections describe how to create and define a Remote Point as well as the characteristics and limitations associated with this scoping tool.
Background
Remote Points are akin to the various remote loads available in the Mechanical application. Remote boundary conditions create remote points in space behind the scenes, or, internally, whereas the Remote Point objects define a specific point in space only. As a result, the external Remote Point can be associated to a portion of geometry that can have multiple boundary conditions scoped to it. This single remote association avoids overconstraint conditions that can occur when multiple remote loads are scoped to the same geometry. The overconstraint occurs because multiple underlying contact elements are used for the individual remote loads when applied as usual to the geometry. When the multiple remote loads are applied to a single remote point, scoped to the geometry, the possibility of overconstraint is greatly reduced.
Remote Points are a powerful tool for working with and controlling the Degrees of Freedom (DOF) of a body. Remote Points provide a property, DOF Selection, which gives you a finer control over the active DOFs used to connect the Remote Point location to the body.
Furthermore, Remote Points can be can be used independently, without being scoped to a boundary condition. Remote Point create MPC equations and therefore can be used to model phenomena, such as coupling a set of nodes so that they have the same DOF solution.
Another capability of Remote Points is that they are also a scoping mechanism for the Constraint Equation object. The equation relates the degrees of freedom (DOF) of one or more remote points
A Remote Point or multiple remote points work in tandem with the following boundary conditions:
These objects acquire data from remote points and eliminate the need to define the objects individually. You can scope one or more of the above objects to a defined Remote Point. This provides a central object to which you can make updates that will affect the scoping of multiple objects.
Note: Following are important points to keep in mind when using Remote Points:
A Remote Point can reference only one Remote Force and one Moment. If you scope a Remote Point to multiple remote forces or moments, duplicate specifications are ignored and a warning message is generated.
A Remote Point with Deformable behavior should not be used on surfaces that are modeled with symmetry boundary conditions. The internally generated weight factors only account for the modeled geometry. Therefore, remote points with deformable behavior should only be used on the "full" geometry.
Remote Points create MPC equations. If a model has constraint equations with too many terms, it is ill-posed, requires significantly higher memory requirements and solution times, and may never converge. The program automatically terminates the solution of such models with an error message stating "If you wish to bypass this message to allow the solution to continue with increased solution time and memory requirements, issue the CEFILTER,OFF command."
For additional Mechanical APDL specific information, see the Multipoint Constraints and Assemblies section as well as KEYOPT(2) in the Mechanical APDL Contact Technology Guide.