3.2.

Large Strain When the strains in a material exceed more than a few percent, the changing geometry due to this deformation can no longer be neglected. Analyses which include this effect are called large strain, or finite strain, analyses. A large strain analysis is performed in a static (ANTYPE,STATIC) or transient (ANTYPE,TRANS) analysis while flagging large deformations (NLGEOM,ON) when the appropriate element type(s) is used. The remainder of this section addresses the large strain formulation for elastic-plastic elements. These elements use a hypoelastic formulation so that they are restricted to small elastic strains (but allow for arbitrarily large plastic strains). Hyperelasticity addresses the large strain formulation for hyperelastic elements, which allow arbitrarily large elastic strains.

Large Deflection This field, applicable to static structural and Transient Structural analyses, determines whether the solver should take into account large deformation effects such as large deflection, large rotation, and large strain. Set Large Deflection to On if you expect large deflections (as in the case of a long, slender bar under bending) or large strains (as in a metal-forming problem). When using hyperelastic material models, you must set Large Deflection On.

Viscoelasticity A material is said to be viscoelastic if the material has an elastic (recoverable) part as well as a viscous (nonrecoverable) part. Upon application of a load, the elastic deformation is instantaneous while the viscous part occurs over time.

Hyperelasticity

Hyperelasticity refers to a constitutive response that is derivable from an elastic free energy potential and is typically used for materials which experience large elastic deformation. Applications for elastomers such as vulcanized rubber and synthetic polymers, along with some biological materials, often fall into this category. The microstructure of polymer solids consists of chain-like molecules. The flexibility of these molecules allows for an irregular molecular arrangement and, as a result, the behavior is very complex. Polymers are usually isotropic at small deformation and anisotropic at larger deformation as the molecule chains realign to the loading direction. Under an essentially monotonic loading

condition, however, many polymer materials can be approximated as isotropic, which has historically been popular in the modeling of polymers. Some classes of hyperelastic materials cannot be modeled as isotropic. An example is fiber reinforced polymer composites. Typical fiber patterns include unidirectional and bidirectional, and the fibers can have a stiffness that is 50-1000 times that of the polymer matrix, resulting in a strongly anisotropic material behavior. Another class of anisotropic materials that can experience large deformation is biomaterials, such as muscles and arteries, in which the anisotropic behavior is due to their fibrous structure. The typical volumetric behavior of hyperelastic materials can be grouped into two classes. Materials such as polymers typically have small volumetric changes during deformation and these are incompressible or nearly-incompressible materials. An example of the second class of materials is foams, which can experience large volumetric changes during deformation, and these are compressible materials. The available hyperelastic material constitutive models are derived from strain-energy potentials that are functions of the deformation invariants. An exception is the response function model which obtains the constitutive response functions directly from experimental data. The hyperelastic material models are defined through data tables (TB,HYPER or TB,AHYPER).

Automatic Time Stepping

Auto time stepping, also known as time step optimization, aims to reduce the solution time especially for nonlinear and/or transient dynamic problems by adjusting the amount of load increment. If nonlinearities are present, automatic time stepping gives the added advantage of incrementing the loads appropriately and retreating to the previous converged solution (bisection) if convergence is not obtained. The amount of load increment is based on several criteria including the response frequency of the structure and the degree of nonlinearities in the analysis. The load increment within a step is controlled by the auto time stepping procedure within limits set by you. You have the option to specify the maximum, minimum and initial load increments. The solution will start with the initial increment but then the automatic procedure can vary further increments within the range prescribed by the minimum and maximum values. You can specify these limits on load increment by specifying the initial, minimum, and maximum number of substeps that are allowed. Alternatively, since a step always has a time span (start time and end time), you can also equivalently specify the initial, minimum and maximum time step sizes. Although it seems like a good idea to activate automatic time stepping for all analyses, there are some cases where it may not be beneficial (and may even be harmful): Problems that have only localized dynamic behavior (for example, turbine blade and hub assemblies), where the low-frequency energy content of part of the system may dominate the highfrequency areas.

Problems that are constantly excited (for example, seismic loading), where the time step tends to change continually as different frequencies are excited. Kinematics (rigid-body motion) problems, where the rigid-body contribution to the response frequency term may dominate.

Automatic time stepping is available for static and transient analyses, and is especially useful for nonlinear solutions. Settings for controlling automatic time stepping are included in a drop down menu under Auto Time Stepping in the Details view

Define By allows you to set the limits on load increment in one of two ways. You can specify the Initial, Minimum and Maximum number of substeps for a step or equivalently specify the Initial, Minimum and Maximum time step size.