Hi there,

I'm new here, so I should briefly introduce myself. I'm a French student working as an intern in a valve manufacturing society. Currently I'm working on the modelling of rubber components using Ansys Workbench v14.

I'm having troubles to model rubber behaviour. If someone has experience in modelling hyper-elastic materials with Ansys Workbench I would be glad to get some advice about it. For instance, how to set correctly the mesh parameters (I'm quiet sure it's the origin of my problem). Or shouldn't I use an explicit solver instead of using the mechanical APDL implicit solver ?

I'm a beginner on this topic so any piece of advice would be great for me.


I try to simulate a simple model : the slipping of a metal piece on a rubber strip (frictionless model).


I should precise that the rubber I study is considered as incompressible


I perform a structural analysis in which there are two load steps :

1 - The metal piece pushes on the rubber strip (normal displacement introducing a penetration)

2 - The metal piece slips on the rubber strip.


In the mesh parameters I set physical preferences to "explicit"
In the shape checking, I tried "explicit" and "Aggressive Mechanical" but both settings lead to an unconverged solution.

Here is my mesh :




the green part is the elastomer and the grey part is the metal piece.


you can see the complete parameters below (sorry it's in french, but I think many words are quiet similar to english)
meshparameters.png


For the contacts settings I chose frictionless and I let the default parameters of Ansys.

I apply a displacement of 1mm on the upper face of the metal piece, and then in the second load step I translate this same piece with a displacement of 10mm.

On the link below you will see my boundary conditions
http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/6...conditions.png


Finally here is a short video presenting an unconverged solution :
http://imageshack.us/clip/my-videos/...ucoidsnss.mp4/

Thank you in advance, it would be really nice to discuss about it with one of you.
Best regards

Pierre