Search Contact Pairs - none found

General Questions
1

I’m doing 4-point bending of a hollow cylinder with some extra features. Because it’s round-on-round contact, I didn’t want to create split surfaces to apply traction forces like Tutorial 11 (composite sandwich)

Instead I created the “rollers” that would be in the test machine and am attempting to set them up with contact pairs like Tutorial 14 (chain links). When I search for contact pairs, it doesn’t generate any - even though the roller should be tangent to the test rod.

Possible sources of error:
I want the “rollers” and the test-rod to be of different materials (something hard like tool steel for the rollers, and either 316SS for the rod or Ti-4). I created 2 sections because of this. One for all 4 rollers in steel, one for the test-rod. Perhaps that makes it harder to search for contact pairs?

Also, should I be doing this a different way? I don’t care about any stress/deformation etc in the rollers, I’d be willing to consider them completely rigid to reduce the complexity of the analysis.

EDIT: here’s a link to the setup

2

Contact pair search is based on 2 criteria - distance and angle. If you increase them (specifically the distance), contact will be found. Give it a try.

Then you could apply rigid body constraints to them.

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