Anyone have an idea of what is going on here? the same section with offset direction is applied yet there are offsets in different directions while the surface normals are all in the same direction. The lower flange on the beam was defined with a different section on each side of the flange so I could reverse one of them. This is version 2.3 as I need the automatic contact generation, perhaps this has been fixed on later versions?
thanks
Luke
Can you share the file (at least the portion of the model where the issue occurs) ?
It’s fixed, but there’s no new dev version with this fix yet.
thanks, my model with 150 surfaces is very nearly working but a few of these random direction offsets are killing me 
I am looking forward to the next version that has auto contacts working and fixes this bug.
I would check the offset definition in keywords and maybe also the normals of the selected elements directly (in addition to geometry normals to be sure) - they depend on the order of nodes under *ELEMENT - right-hand rule around the nodes in this order. From the Abaqus manual:
What kind og meshing are you using? Gmsh? I noticed that Gmsh does that with some algorithm types.
