Conditional Contact - curved surface

Main Forum
1

Hi

I would like to model the contact forces at the interface between the exoskeleton and the human. I have tried using the conditional contact class (the same from Ground Reaction Force prediction and the Seated Human example) and I got fairly good results so far. It turned out that the frictional forces evaluated by this class played an important role in my results.

However, the contact surface defined in this class is a plane surface with a well defined normal direction. I would like to refine my model further to simulate the curved surface contact between the exoskeleton and the human skin. For my exoskeleton, I created a simple model in SolidWorks and used the SolidWorks to AnyBody plugin. So, I have the STL file of the surface of the exoskeleton that should contact with the skin. On the other hand, for the skin, I am defining a few nodes on the patch that should contact with the exoskeleton.

Any suggestions on how should I proceed to define a curved surface contact in the Conditional Contact class?

Best regards
Dave

2

Hi Dave,

I would use the following approach:

[ol]
[li] Define matching pairs of nodes for skin and exo-skeleton.
[/li][li] Ensure normals are correct
[/li][li] Setup conditional contact in each of the points
[/li][/ol]

So in this way you are reusing the conditional contact class but not on one plane surface, but multiple plane surfaces one for each node.

Best regards
Søren