Contact Creator

You can create contacts as part of the pipeline using the contact creator operation.

The contact creator operation assists you in automating your simulation pipeline and reducing the amount of manual work required in setting up periodic contacts, weak in-place contacts, and baffles. The contact creator allows you to create contacts between part surfaces and maintains this step as part of the pipeline. The contact creator operation enables you to create the following types of contacts:
  • Weak Contact
  • Baffles
  • Periodic Translation
  • Periodic Rotation

The weak contact type is intended for use in cases where you have many bodies and do not want to imprint them all together. For this use-case, you can choose to generate meshes per-part (activated by Per-Part Meshing on the Automated Mesh operation) and let the solver imprint meshes on the skin of the volume mesh later. This method is popular for conjugate heat transfer (CHT) cases. You can only generate non-conformal meshes when meshing per-part and using weak in-place contacts.

Some general rules about contact creation:
  • The operation does not create a new contact if a surface happens to be in an existing contact prior to execution.
  • Baffle and periodic contacts created by the operation are deleted when you delete the operation. Weak contacts remains after deletion of the operation.
  • Baffle contacts cannot be created on surfaces that are only partially a baffle. That is, the entire part surface must entirely be a baffle, or no baffle contact is created.
  • Periodic contacts require a one-to-one relation between contacting surfaces. That is, two surfaces cannot be mapped to a single surface.
  • Periodic contacts can be created between surfaces belonging to different parts.
  • Periodic contacts are only created if the projected surface area of the input part surfaces are within 10 % of each other.

Contact Creator Options

Set the options to control the outcome of the contact creator operation.
Input Parts
Specifies the parts to include in the operation.
Contact Type
Specifies the contact type for the operation. The options available are:
  • Weak Contact—allows you to create contacts between part surfaces. For more information, see 原位接触.
  • Baffles—surfaces that can be topologically separated from the part while keeping the rest of the part closed. For more information, see 使用挡板.
  • Periodic Translation and Periodic Rotation—surfaces that are spatially detached, but a rotation or translation can make them coincident. For more information, see 周期接触.
Tolerance
Define the maximum value of geometric features between the contacting surfaces. The geometric feature used is dependent on the Contact Type.
  • Weak Contact—defines the maximum allowed distance between the contacting surfaces.
  • Periodic Translation and Periodic Rotation—the perimeters of the input surfaces are projected to a plane where the normal lies along the translational or rotational axis. On the plane a 2D bounding box is generated around each surface perimeter, and the distances between the centroid locations (of the projected perimeters) and corner locations (of the bounding boxes) are compared to the specified value. If either geometric feature is outside of the specified limit, no contacts are created. For most cases, the default tolerance is appropriate.
  • Baffles—as baffle contacts are created on a single surface, this property is ignored.