Products: Abaqus/Standard Abaqus/Explicit Abaqus/CAE
Benefits: You can use nodal adjustment to adjust user-specified nodal coordinates so that the nodes lie on a given surface. This is useful in situations such as defining fasteners, where the specified reference node should be positioned at its projection point on the associated surface, but that position may be known only approximately; you can use nodal adjustment to move the reference node to that location automatically.
Description: In general, user-specified nodal coordinates are not modified during input file processing. However, there are some situations where mesh coordinates are known only in a generic way and it is inconvenient to determine their coordinates for their actual usage. To adjust the nodal coordinates, you identify the nodes to be moved and the surface onto which they are to be moved.
Nodes can be moved to the surface using a normal adjustment or a directed adjustment. By default, the nodes are adjusted to the closest point on the specified surface along the normal to the surface. You can specify an orientation to move the nodes to the surface along a given direction rather than along the normal to the surface.
Interaction module: ConstraintCreate: Adjust points Constraint