The following contact and connection enhancements were made at Release 2026 R1:
Contact Enhancements
Ramping Contact Stiffness. You can now control how contact stiffness is ramped during your analysis using the new Ramp Stiffness By property of the Contact Region object. This property enables you to specify ramping using the following options:
Program Controlled: The solver decides how and when to ramp the contact stiffness.
Load Step: Stiffness is ramped during a designated load step.
Time Range: Stiffness is ramped over a specified time interval.
New Target Shell Face Option. Now, using the new option, Top and Bottom, of the Target Shell Face property, you can model contact pairs on the top and the bottom of a shell/surface body face using only one set of the target surface. This capability reduces the total number of target elements while also improving the processing of large assembly models where the orientations of underlying shell elements are not obvious or consistent.
Constraint Type Enhancements. The Constraint Type property option, Mixed Assembly, now supports solid-to-solid contact definitions.
Connections Enhancements
Joint, Spring, and Beam Connections. When defined as a Remote Attachment, you can now scope Joints, Springs, and Beam connections to one or more nodes.
Automatically Merge Contacts. When using the Connections Group object with the Connection Type property set to Contact and the Group By property set to Faces, the application now automatically merges contacts wherever possible. This enhancement enables you to:
Reduce over-constraint issues found with MPC formulation-based contacts, particularly when multiple contacts share the same target faces or have overlapping scoping.
Minimize the number of contacts created in the majority of the cases. For example, a PCB model where a multiple contacts share a common target face. This also reduces the overall computational time taken by the solver in most cases.
Connections Worksheet. The Connections worksheet now includes a new context (right-click) menu option: Fit to Screen Width. This feature automatically adjusts the widths of all table columns to evenly fill the available space.
Additionally, when you select the existing Reset Columns option, the application now automatically hides any column where all values are set to Program Controlled or Not Applicable (N/A).