ME5554/ME5305

Tutorial on a 2D Problem with Plasticity and Contact

1. The problem

We want to study a 500x20x200mm3 aluminium flat bar loaded in 3-point bending.

The testing rig uses 3 60mm steel rollers, as shown in the figure below, and the test
is conducted by prescribing the displacement of the top roller.

Figure 1: geometry and boundary conditions.

The width-to-depth (200/20=10) of the cross section can be considered large enough
to assume a state of plane stress is a good enough approximation. Hence, we can
study the problem with a 2D model.
1.1 How to apply the actual load?
Modelling the contact between rollers and beams allows an easier and more
accurate representation of the actual load applied on the flat bar by the rollers, both
in the middle and on the supports.
An alternative method could be the application of a downward displacement only at
one point at the mid span, and prescribe the vertical displacements only on two
points at the supports, which would generate concentrated forces. In the case of a
linear elastic analysis, these concentrated forces would result in infinite values of the
stresses at such points in the exact mathematical solution. In the finite-element
solution, which is an approximation of the exact mathematical one, the stress would
not be infinite, but as the mesh is refined around the points of application of load and
reactions, the stress at these points would always increase, and tend to infinity as the
element size tends to zero. This normally leads to a relatively small over prediction of
displacements, whereas for stresses and strains errors are limited to a small zone
around the points of application of load and reactions.
For an elasto-plastic problem, concentrated forces result in infinite values of the
plastic strains in the exact mathematical solution. This is a bigger problem because,
upon mesh refinement, unrealistic large plastic strains are found that, for a refined-
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enough mesh would lead to an unrealistic collapse. Furthermore, for cases when the
assumption of small displacements and strains could normally be made
(geometrically linear problem), the actual FE solution would end up violating such
assumptions.
Alternative options could be of creating small volumes around the points of
application of load and reactions, where the constitutive behaviour is assumed to be
linear elastic. However, this can lead to excessive errors at the mid-span, where the
plastic hinge would not be well captured.
Other alternative options can be considered, e.g. with loads/displacement applied on
small areas rather than points, and by constraining these small areas to the points of
applications of loads and displacements, but these methods require experience and
can still lead to errors. With experience, one can also consider the use of a mesh
which is coarse enough around the point of applications of load and reactions, to
avoid excessive stress concentration, yet not too coarse to have an excessive error
in the solution. Again, with limited experience this can lead to big errors..
Therefore, with contact models available in most commercial codes, the actual model
of the part of the rollers in contact with the flat bar is probably the most effective
option. Disadvantages however exist and are (a) an increased computational cost
(more iterations and sometimes smaller increments needed to achieve convergence)
and (b) possible difficulty in achieving convergence in the equilibrium iterations of an
increment, particularly when friction is used.
2 FE model
2.1 Parts
Note that the rollers can be considered stiff enough, so that only half of each of them
is modelled. Also, we can exploit symmetry. Therefore, three parts are created in
ABAQUS, all of them started as deformable, 2D planar, shell: one half flat bar, as a
250x20mm^2 rectangle; one half roller and one quarter roller. The latter are made
from a 30mm diameter circle and by suitably using cut extrude in the Part Module.
All these operations are described in the other 2D and 3D tutorials on BBL, but an
example of how to cut the circle into half is shown below.
Click on Create Cut: Extrude:

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Sketch a rectangle with the top side containing the horizontal diameter:

Click on Cancel procedure and then on Done to obtain the half roller:

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It is convenient to right-click on the part, which is now the half roller, and click on
Copy, to make the quarter roller with an analgous Cut: Extrude operation.

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2.2 Assembly
In Assembly, double-click on Instances, select all the three of them, and for
convenience tick on Auto-offset from other instances:

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To translate the half-roller in the right position, click on Translate Instance:

Then select the half-roller and click on Done.

Click on the top point of the roller as start point for the translation vector and to the
left-bottom vertex of the flat bar as the end point.

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 Start point

End point

Then click on Ok.

Again, click on the Translate Instance button. Select again the half-roller, click on
Done, and now enter manually the X,Y values 0,0 as start point, follwed by Enter,
and then 25,0 as end point, again followed by Enter.

End point

Then Click on Ok and you shoulf find the half-roller in the right place, as below:

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For the quarter-roller, first rotate the instance by clicking on Rotate Instance:

Then select the quarter-roller, click on Done, select any of the verteces of the half-
roller (e.g. the top point, but this is not important) as the centre of rotation, insert
180 as angle of rotation (this is important), click Enter and then click Ok.
Choosing the top point of the quarter roller for the centre of rotation and one would
find the result in the figure below.

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Then repeat the procedure to translate instances, applying it to the quarter-roller and
using as start point the bottom point of the roller, and for end point the top-right
vertex of the flat bar:

Start point
End point

Click Ok and you should find the result below:

To set up the meshes directly on the instances of the assembly instead of in the
parts, expand the Instances by clicking on +,

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select all instances in the assembly, right-click an choose Make Independent.

2.3 Assembly
To mesh the model, the datum planes shown below are used. They are at distances
of 20, 40 and 200 (mm) from the left end.

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They have been created by clickin gon Datum plane, choosing principal plane YZ
as the one to offset, and then using an offset value equal to:
X coordinate of left end + distance desired from the left hand.
The X coordinate of the left end can be found by using the Query button shown
below, which is very useful in a large number of situations, selecting point and
picking up the point of interest. Notice that prospective view has been toggled off in
the figure. Prospective can be toggled on or off using the button also shown below.

Prospective Query
on/off

Point to query

Coordinates of the point

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Using the above datum points, and following methods well described in the other
tutorials on BBL, partitions are made and all instances are meshed, using plane-
strain elements with incompatible modes and without reduced integration.
Notice only that in order to select and seed in a different way different lines of the
model, it is useful to use the Seed edge button and the different selection modes
shown in the figure below:

Selection modes (self-explanatory)

Seed Edges

The meshes created are shown below:

.

.
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2.4 Material model
We will consider an aluminum, and will use for it an elastoplastic model with
nonlinear isotropic hardening. Let us assume we are given as material parameters
the proof strength , that is the yield stress in correpondence of a plastic strain of
0.2%=0.002 (in a uniaxial test) and the utimate tensile strength (UTS) and the
corresponding strain . We will consider the following data:
. = 280 MPa UTS = 330 Mpa = 0.06 = 6%
The material behaviour in a uniaxial test can be well approximated with the Ramberg-
Osgood law:

= + 0.002 ( )

where is the Youngs modulus and is a parameter to be determined. For any
aluminium the Youngs modulus is 70GPa (or very close to it). Parameter can be
determined by enforcing that for = UTS one has = :
UTS UTS
= + 0.002 ( )

In this case it must be:
310 330
0.06 = + 0.002 ( )
70000 280
which leads to:
1 330
ln [0.002 (0.06 70000)]
= = 20.2
330
ln (280)

The input data needed for an elastoplastic model with nonlinear isotropic hardening
in ABAQUS is a list of stress values and the corresponding plastic strains during the
tensile test.
One can use the equation:

=20.2027128
= 0.002 ( ) = 0.002 (280) = +

which leads to the following table:

stress plastic strain total strain

0.0001 1.1245E-133 1.42857E-09
10 1.16014E-32 0.000142857
20 1.40002E-26 0.000285714
30 5.05424E-23 0.000428571
40 1.6895E-20 0.000571429
50 1.53321E-18 0.000714286
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 60 6.09927E-17 0.000857143
70 1.37336E-15 0.001
80 2.03882E-14 0.001142857
90 2.20191E-13 0.001285714
100 1.85023E-12 0.001428571
110 1.26902E-11 0.001571429
120 7.36039E-11 0.001714286
130 3.70843E-10 0.001857143
140 1.65732E-09 0.002000002
150 6.67953E-09 0.002142864
160 2.46038E-08 0.002285739
170 8.37371E-08 0.002428655
180 2.65719E-07 0.002571694
190 7.92143E-07 0.002715078
200 2.23279E-06 0.002859376
210 5.98313E-06 0.003005983
220 1.53141E-05 0.003158171
230 3.75931E-05 0.003323307
240 8.88225E-05 0.003517394
250 0.000202625 0.003774053
260 0.00044752 0.004161805
270 0.000959275 0.004816417
280 0.002 0.006
290 0.004063672 0.008206529
300 0.008060619 0.012346333
310 0.015633776 0.020062348
320 0.029690988 0.034262416
330 0.055285714 0.06

What should be inserted in ABAQUS are the first two columns. The third one is
useful to check that for a total strain of 6%=0.06 one has a stress equal to the UTS.
Likewise, from the second column one can check that for the platic strain equal to
0.002 the stress is equal to the proof stress.
Notice that to have this precisely the more precise value in of = 20.2027128 was
used in Excel, otherwise . With = 20.2 the values are nearly the same.
One can notice that the plastic strain is nonzero for values very small of the stresses.
However, this is just a numerical feature of the Ramberg-Osgood equation, as for
values of the stress lower than about 230 the plastic strain is less than 1% of the total
strain. Hence, it is a good approximation to assume that the elastic law is valid until a
stress of 220, which can be considered as the initial yield stress, and then the rest of
the table is used. Hence we are going to input the following table:
220 0
230 3.76132E-05
240 8.88597E-05
250 0.000202687
260 0.00044761
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 270 0.000959369
280 0.002
290 0.004063285
300 0.00805911
310 0.01562946
320 0.029680234
330 0.055261077

To this end, in ABAQUS we create a material model Aluminium.

We first choose Mechanical Elasticity Elastic and input 70000 and 0.33 as
Youngs modulus and Poissons ratio.
We then choose Mechanical Plasticity Plastic, and the copy and past the
Excel table above into the one in the ABAQUS field below:

with the Hardening option left Isotropic (default one) and all the other choices also
left as by default.
You can then save.
For the roller, another elastic material model that you can name High-srength steel
should be made, with Youngs modulus equal to 70000 (MPa) and Poissons ratio
equal to 0.27. We can reasonably assume that the the high strength of the steel is
sufficient to avoid plasticity, and therefore that no plasticity is included. This is
reasonable if in the experiment no residual deformation of the roller is found.
To actually assign the material models to the right parts, the usual steps as in the
previous tutorials can be used.

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2.5 Modelling contact
To model contact, one needs to define slave and master surfaces that are in
potential contact with each other.
To this end, double click on Interactions:

Name the interaction (to be created) as you wish (here Left-roller is chosen) and
click on Surface-to-surface contact (Standard).

and on Continue.
Select the top edge of the roller as first master surface:

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Click on Done.
Now the slave surface needs to be defined. To this end, click on Node region to
choose slave type and then click on the part of the beam bottom surface that is I
contact with the roller:

Click on Done and the Edit interaction window appears. Leave the default options
and click right below on the Create interaction property button as shown below:

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Give a name (Unilateral-contact here) and click on Contact, if not yet selected, and
then on Continue:

Choose Mechanical Normal behaviour and then leave the default optinon of
Hard contact. Then click Ok.
Do the same operation for the quarter roller.
It is better to have the roller edge always as master surface because it is likely to
have a coarser mesh. This is because it is more accurate to thave the master surface
coinciding with the one having the coarser mesh (see manual for more explanation of
why this is recommended).

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2.5 Create a step and apply boundary conditions
Create a step with Static Analysis, here named Load with a period of 1 (s), an initial
increment of 0.05 (s) and a maximum increment of 0.05 (s). Notice that here the
response is assumed rate-independent and that the analysis is static so that (time-
dependent) inertia forces are not included. Therefore, the time is really a pseudo
time that is just a parameter that shows the evolution of loading. In other words,
whether the load is applied in 1 or in 20 seconds does not change the final results.
You can change the time period and the maximum and initial time increments
accordingly if you wish to compare the results with an experiment more easily. For
example, if in the experiment the displacement is applied with a rate of 0.1 mm/s,
then you can apply 60mm of displacements in 600s. Hence the period would be 600
s and the minimum and maximum time increments can be scaled down to
0.05*600=30s.
As boundary conditions, fix the bottom edge of the left roller (zero displacements U1
and U2). Since we are using solid elements, which only have translational degrees of
freedom, there is no need to constrain rotations, so you can ignore U3.
For top edge of the roller at the right-end , apply zero displacement in the horizontal
direction (U1) and -60mm in the bottom direction (U2):

Apply symmetry boundary conditions as shown below:

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2.6 Run
Now you can create and submit a job and run the analysis in the usual way.

3 Post-processing
In this section, a few tips for post-processing of results are given.
3.1 Resize legend so that numbers are readable
Click on Viewport, then on Viewport Annotation Options and then on Set Font,
choosing 14 instead of 8.
You can also tick Triad, Title block and State block to make the other annotations
readable but what matters really is that the legend with the contour plot values can
be read. Otherwise the colours have only a very qualitative meaning.

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The result is below and numbers can be read (in the screen shot as well as in figures
that can be exported, as shown below).

To export the actual Viewport into a jpg figure, first of all make sure that the current
work directory is the one where you want the file in the end. To check and possibly
change the work directory, on the main menu go on File Set Work Directory and
change it to the right one is not already so.
To export the picture, click on File and then on Print , as shown below:

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Then tick File instead of Printer, choose a name (here VMises) and choose TIFF
(easier to paste into a Word file).

Click OK and you should fine the file VMises_stress.tif in the work directory.

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If you copy and paste the file into a Word file, as was done below, you can see the
the legend is clearly well readable even if the figure is reduced.

3.2 Scaled or actual deformation

For a geometrically linear analysis, the deformation is automatically scaled by the
program so that it can be easily be appreciated with naked eye. To change this, one
can click on Options Common, then tick Uniform instead of Auto-compute and
insert the value 1 to have the actual deformation in scale 1:1.

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For a geometrically nonlinear analysis (where displacements may be very large), the
default option is that the deformation is shown in the actual size (that is in scale 1:1).

3.2 Plotting the load-displacement curve

In this case, displacement control is applied. Hence, the load measured by the load
cell in the experiment is the total reaction of the centre roller. However, in this case
because of symmetry, the total force to be compared with the experimentally
measured load is twice the reaction of the quarter of roller in the centre.
In turn, the reaction force at the roller is determined as the sum of all nodal reactions
of the nodes of the roller edge, as these are the nodes where the a downward
displacement was applied. On these nodes, at each increment of the analysis the
same displacement (equal to the prescribed one) but different nodal reactions are
computed by the FE model.
In summary, the numercally computed load-displacement curve is obtained as a XY
dataset where the X-data are the displacements (at each increment) of any one
(arbitrarily chosen) node on the mid-roller edge while the load is the sum of all nodal
reactions.
Both the displacement and the load turn out to be negative in the reference system of
the model, so these should be changed sign before comparing them with the load-
displacement curve experimentally measured.
Practically it is quite useful in ABAQUS to use node sets. In this case, when the
boundary conditions were applied at the top edge of the mid roller (zero horizontal
displacement and prescribed (negative) vertical displacement), automatically the
program creates a node set with all nodes on the top edge where such boundary
condition is applied. To determine what this set is, when visualising the results, in the
left pane one can expand the Output Database, by clicking on the related [+] sign
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(which then changes to [-]), and then likewise expand Jobs-1.odb and Node-sets.
Clicking on each one of the node sets, the related nodes will be highlighted in red in
the model.
Here, we can find that node-set 29 is associated with the nodes of the top edge of te
mid roller, as shown in the figure below:

Expanded

Expanded

Node set 29

Now that we know that node set 29 contains the nodes of interests we can proceed
as follows.
Click on Create XY Data as shown below:

Choose ODB field output and click on Continue

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In the drop-down list next to Position, click on Unique Nodal. This is because we
are interested in the results at the nodes of the FE model, and not at the integration
points of elements.

Scroll down in the list of variables, and expand displacements (U) and reaction
forces (RF), clicking on the black triangle as shown below. Then select the vertical
components, by ticking RF2 and U2.

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 Scroll down
Select vertical
components

Now click on OK. Then click on the tab Elements/Nodes and then on Node sets
and, within the window that appears, on SET-29, as shown below:

Now click on Save and then on OK. Close the window by clicking on the top-right
corner button.

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All the nodal forces and displacements (X data) in direction 2 of Node set 29 are now
stored, each one against time (Y data) for each increment. However, we need a XY
dataset with the load against the displacement (of anyone of the nodes as they have
the same displacement). To this end we need to suitably operate with these data.
Hence, click again on XY data and choose Operate with XY data.

Click on Continue. In the dialog window that appears, scroll down in the operator
field and click on Combine(X,X) that will appear in the top field.

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At this point, within the round brackets next to Combine, type - (minus):

minus

Click on anyone of the displacements U:U2 . and then on Add to Expression

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Type a comma and then a -2 and a *, that is type ,-2* (2 is because of symmetry,
as otherwise only half of the total load would be computed).

With the cursor blinking after the *, scroll down in the list of operators and choose
Sum((A,A,)) then click on the first of the list of reaction forces, press and hold the
Shift key and click the last of the reaction forces, so that all of them are selected as
below. At this point click on Add to Expression.

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 Scroll down

You should see as below:

Click on Save As and choose a name for the curve. Here it is called Load-
displacement:

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Click on OK. You can now click on Plot Expression and close the window. You
should see the plot below.

Clicking on XY Data Manager

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The you can select all the XY data except Load-Displacement and delete them (click
on Detele and then on OK). This is practical to avoid keeping all the data that were
only needed to combine the XY data.
Deleting these data is particularly useful if the analysis is run again after making
some changes and then one wants to plot a new load-displacement curve, because
the displacements and rotations from the previous and current analyses could be
mixed up.

The curve can now be seen and edited by going on XY Data, right-clicking on Load-
displacement and choosing Edit

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In older versions of ABAQUS one could select and copy all the XY data and paste
them onto an Excel sheet. In more recent versions it seems that these data cannot
be copied and pasted, so a report should be exported.
To this end, click on Report in the main menu and on XY

Select Load-displacement and click on OK.

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This will add the XY data to the report in the file abaqus.rpt. This is a text file that
can be opened with any text editor, for example with the standard Write of Windows.
In this case the following file appears:

This file can be copied and pasted on Excel, where with standard techniques such as
clicking on Data in the main menu, then on Text to Columns, choosing Delimited,
then Next, and ticking on Space as one additional delimeter, Next then Finish.

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The result below is found

Clicking again on a contour plot, one can view the coponents of strains against time
by clicking again on Create XY data (as earlier shown). Choose ODB field output,
untick RF and U in the variables and tick the variable of interest, for example E11
in this case for the strain in direction x.
This time, clicking on Elements/Nodes you can click on Edit Selection and pick the
node which is of interest. In this case, the top right point in the flat bar (on the axis of
symmetry), is chosen as shown below.

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Make sure that the point is the one in the beam and not in the roller. To this end you
can disactivate the option Select the Entity Closer to the Screen.

With this optin disactivated, when you click on the node you can check whether the
selection is correct or change clicking on Next or Previous as shown below:

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Once the selection is correct, you can click on OK. The following graph should
appear when you click on Plot.

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