The 10th bi-annual LS-DYNA Users Conference is less than a week away. You can visit the conference home page for more details. While you are there, look for information on d3VIEW in booth 101 hosted by FEA Information, Marsha Victory.

LS-DYNA offers ability to offset a defined curve. This helps us to for example to define an arbitrary fire time for airbags by simply changing the offset value rather than to change the entire curve. Depending on the type of curve, LS-DYNA adds two points at the beginning of the curve for positive offsets and…

When using TIEBREAK contacts, options other than 1, ties nodes ONLY if the nodes are initially in contact. Nodes not initially in contact will not be tied but can interact with master segments like the traditioanal compression-only contacts. To enforce the “initially” in contact condition, the [initial_separation-(slave_thickness+master_thickness)*0..5] < 0 which causes the initial penetration or…

A new LS-OPT support site is established with lots of useful information that covers examples, theory and many download materials.

Here are 10 things (based on experience) that one can use to improve contact stability in any LS-DYNA simulations. They are not in any particular order. 1. Avoid duplicate contact definitions. The general thumbrule is no pair of node/segment or segment/segment (in soft=2) should be treated for penetration by more than one contact defintion 2.…

While working on a simulation model, it is often very convenient for oneself or to others to make necessary notes that documents the changes in the input file. While each person’s method of documenting changes in short sentences could vary, a formal pattern of documentation could help unify the documentation so anyone can easily follow…

A recent investigation to determine the best viewing configuration for any arbitrary model required me to understand the ‘QUAT’ that appears in LS-PREPOST every time you rotate a model or change its view. If you are interested to understand this, you can view this Powerpoint document for more information.

Clustered solutions dominate the market today with MPP-LSDYNA being used worldwide when 2 or more processors per job are used. Managing compute nodes manually in a cluster is certainly primitive and hence the need for a good resource manager. SLURM is an open source resource manager with lots of good features and is available from…