Hi there,
Im new here, so I should briefly introduce myself. Im a French student working as an intern in a valve manufacturing society. Currently Im working on the modelling of rubber components using Ansys Workbench v14.
Im 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 (Im quiet sure its the origin of my problem). Or shouldnt I use an explicit solver instead of using the mechanical APDL implicit solver ?
Im 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 :
[IMG] 
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the green part is the elastomer and the grey part is the metal piece.
you can see the complete parameters below (sorry its in french, but I think many words are quiet similar to english)
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
[url] 
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Finally here is a short video presenting an unconverged solution :
[URL= http://imageshack.us/clip/my-videos/684/efjzayldorevxucoidsnss.mp4/ ]http://imageshack.us/clip/my-videos/684/efjzayldorevxucoidsnss.mp4/[/URL]
Thank you in advance, it would be really nice to discuss about it with one of you.
Best regards
Pierre