How to automatically select and edit contract regions that were auto generated from geometry

Wilder

Hi,

I have a model with 1,117 contract regions that were automatically created from the geometry.

I've looked through some of them and believe they are all correct. I ran a test case and the model is connected well. However some of these contacts are screws in holes, and others are flat surfaces. I'm ok with the screw contacts being "bonded", but I think the flat surfaces should be "no separation" because there is no bond - the screws should be taking the shear and tension load between these surfaces. I feel if they are bonded I won't get accurate stresses in the screws.

For example this should not be bonded:

But this can be:

In smaller models I'm able to manually edit the contact and change the contact type. I realize if I select multiple contacts I can change the type at once. But there seems to be no order to how the contact regions were created, and I can't find a way to only select the flat contact regions so that I can change their types to No Separation.

Is there a way to select contact regions based on similar features, kind of like the power select tool? Or a script that can be run that will look through all of the contact regions and change only the ones with flat surfaces to No Separation?

Thanks!

-Wilder

Mike.Thompson

This is not a full code example, but the general idea would be to loop through the contacts and get the contact/target scopings. From the scopings you can get a set of faces (assuming they are scoped to faces).
For each of the faces you can loop through and check what "SurfaceType" with MyFace.SurfaceType. This will let you know if you have planar faces, or other types.
Based on the types of faces you have in the contact definition you can set your logic to modify the contact (or not) per your needs.