Many of the cases I am trying to solve involve contact between two bodies, such as screw connections, clamping or mechanisms. Due to the deformation caused by loads a separation should occur in several cases, but it does not in any of my simulations with FreeCAD.
So I created the following simple test-case to illustrate my problem. It is two flat cantilever beams, one fixed on the left the other on the right. The beams partially overlap and the contact BC is applied on these two contact faces. A force is applied in the center, which creates a bending load.
The result of my simulation is shown below:
This result is physically wrong because the beams remain glued together (no separation or lift-off) and there is zero stress at the contact face.
The result I expect should look like this (obtained by artificially introducing a gap where I expect separation):
Can someone please be so kind pointing me to where my mistake is?
From other Calculix forum posts I thought to understand that the separating contact BC is the default. So I would expect that FreeCAD/Calculix would return a result like in the lower image and resolve the proper location of the separation point because it is a function of the deformation cause by the stress loads.
I would be grateful for any hints!
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FreeCAD and Calculix input files:
FreeCAD version:
- Version: 0.21.30492 (Git) AppImage
- OS: Linux Mint 20.2 (X-Cinnamon/cinnamon)