So Andy, I wanted to ask you about contact

because it's something that comes up very often in practice,

but we hardly teach.
And I've seen students kind of struggling
with assemblies where they have contacts and they're
getting convergence issues and so on.
And in this particular model, you've done a very nice job
of laying out what the contacts are.
You added in the contacts manually and then
you decided which is going to be bonded, which
is going to be frictionless, which is going to be the contact surface,
and which is going to be the target.
So I wanted to get your perspective on what your thought process was
as you laid out those contacts.
Sure thing, and let me hop over to the model
and I'll show you what I was thinking in the process.
In this assembly, we have one bonded contact,
which is between the bolt and the nut.
When we do this in practice, if we were to fasten these together
and we were to tug on the nut, it would be stuck in place pretty
well with the bolt. Certainly, the bolt and nut
is a more complex system where you have a mechanical advantage
system with a lot of threads.
But we're looking, we can effectively simplify the model
and get a very good answer.
Now admittedly, when I created my very first model,
I bonded everything together to make sure that I could get results.
And then I interpreted the results and then I went further
and then I started adding in frictionless contacts.
So when it comes to the contact between the two flanges, in reality
if we had strong hands, we could slide these two surfaces against each other.
Or we could pull on one and pull on the other
and they would be able to separate.
So the bonded contact, if we used that, they would not be allowed to separate.
In fact, they would be welded together.
But in reality, they're not welded together.
They're allowed to move and slide and separate, hence that condition.
With the frictionless between the underside
of the bolt and then the flange, one could do this bonded
because there's enough friction to keep it in place.
However, in reality when one is putting on the bolt,
there is a little bit of sliding here and there, so that's incorporated.
In addition to the nut and the lower flange, there is some sliding allowed.
And finally, between the shank or the threads
and then the remainder of the hole, those surfaces
would not be allowed to go through each other,
but they're also not bonded to each other.
So that was the logic in that.
And I'll say in addition, you may be thinking,
OK, frictionless is used here, how about not frictional? Because these parts,
they have some sort of friction factor.
The friction prep factor's probably one because we have metal on metal.
However, frictionless is nice because it takes the friction out of the equation.
It makes one less thing for us to worry about.
And it typically makes the results conservative,
meaning if we're looking at gapping, it'll probably
give us the worst case gapping.
That's what I've seen in practice.
OK.
So you started-- do you recommend that students start off with bonded contact
to see if that'll solve, and then kind of go in
and put in frictionless and so on?
Because bonded is, you know, if that doesn't solve,
then you have a real problem, right?
Yeah, I think that's a great procedure.
And it can save a lot of time just doing it progressively, adding
in more complexity.
Yeah.
You know, I always keep telling students crawl before you can walk.
Some take the advice.
Most of them are like, no, I want to get this done.
It's like, tell me which buttons to push to make it work.
And one more thing I wanted to ask you about contact
is if you go to, say the first lower nozzle to mid nozzle
frictionless, say that one, how do you decide which is the contact
and which is the target?
Oh, right.
Right.
OK, so the contact is typically the smaller body, or the convex body
in the case of rounded objects.
And then in terms of the target, that's typically
the larger body or the concave body.
And that's what the user manual states.
For many situations, it doesn't really matter which one
you pick as target or contact.
You could probably choose either.
You could choose either in this case and it won't make much of a difference
because they're planar surfaces.
And another way to figure it out is just to try both and then see
if you get a difference in the answer.
And I'll just add one more thing, is that ANSYS calls it contact and target,
and so contact has kind of like two meanings.
We have the different contacts between the bodies,
and then there's like the contact and target, which refer
to side A and side B of the parts.
So just a differentiation there.
And it's looking for where these parts come into contact and, you know,
how much.
Right.
And typically, you're putting contacts on surfaces, right?
You're looking at where the parts come into contact with each other
and then you're picking those surfaces and putting in contacts there.
Is that what you're doing?
Is that your thought process?
That's correct.
That was very helpful, Andy.
Thank you.