Abaqus Release Notes  


4.14 Thickness and material orientation distributions for membrane elements and sections

Products: Abaqus/Standard  Abaqus/CAE  

Benefits: Using distributions to specify spatially varying thicknesses and material orientations on membrane elements greatly simplifies the modeling process and improves performance for models with a significant amount of element property variation.

Description: In Abaqus/Standard you can now define material orientations and thickness for membrane elements using distributions. These enhancements allow you to minimize the number of section definitions needed for a model that has significant variation of these features, which can lead to performance improvements during pre- and postprocessing.

In Abaqus/CAE you can now use an analytical field or an element-based discrete field to define the spatially varying membrane thickness, as shown in Figure 4–13.

Figure 4–13 Using element distributions for membrane thickness.

Abaqus/CAE Usage: 
Property module:
    SectionCreate; Category: Shell; Type: Membrane
    Membrane thickness: Element distribution
References:

Abaqus Analysis User's Manual

Abaqus/CAE User's Manual

Abaqus Keywords Reference Manual

Abaqus Verification Manual