Engineering stories, methods, and ideas.
Practical work from simulation, physical testing, data, automation, and the decisions that connect them.
Latest articles
*DEFINE_CONTACT_VOLUME for *SET_{OPTION}_GENERAL
I am glad to announce that the latest version of LS-DYNA will support the use of *DEFINE_CONTACT_VOLUME in any *SET_{OPTION}_GENERAL keyword. As most of …
Class Notes
Recently, I was teaching a class for Black & Decker, and one of the students, Kevin, was taking notes that I thought captured my lecture quite well. I …
2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference Summary By Sven Holcombe
Sven Holcombe of JARI sent us this great presentation summary that covers some of the paper presentation at the 2007 Japan LS-DYNA Conference. Its has been …
Membrane Thinning in Shell Elements
In 2D shell elements, the stress in the normal (fiber) direction is iteratively reduced to zero to meet the plane-stress condition. The strains are however …
Eliminating Contact Force Interference in Spotweld Forces Using SPOTTHIN in *CONTROL_CONTACT
In mesh independent deformable spotwelds (see here ), the actual spotwelds are represented using either beams or solids (single or cluster). The nodes of …
Shell Element Stress and Strain Output to D3PLOT – A Brief Overview
A few questions recently from some users while teaching a class prompted me to write this overview regarding the data output, particularly for shell …
Contact and Global Timestep
You may have seen this popular message that is printed out by LS-DYNA for every simulation. The LS-DYNA time step size should not exceed 0.456E-06 to avoid …
Blog Statistics – Thank You!
Just wanted to post some stats (courtesy http://www.statcounter.com) we gathered for the blog. It has been extremely gratifying that readers come back to …
Makefile – Is This Just for Programmers?
Recently, I have been assembling models outside of any pre-processors and found that the use of Makefile can often be very helpful in putting together …
Coverage of Japan LS-DYNA Conference – Courtesy Sven Holcombe
I am glad to write that Sven Holcombe from Japan will be providing us a brief first-hand coverage of the Japan LS-DYNA Conference that is going to happen …
Subsystem Swapping Made Easy with *SET_NODE_GENERAL, *SET_SEGMENT_GENERAL, and *INCLUDE_TRANSFORM
In web technology, it is a common practice to build applications that “share nothing”. For example, if a web application is running on a web server, and …
iPhone Support
This blog is now optimized for viewing on iPhones.