It depends on the diagnostic setting you define on the NLOPRM case control command. If you set NLDBG to N3DMED or N3DADV you get more additional contact diagnostics. N3DADV gives a LOT of detailed diagnostic information that helps understand the touching/separating status of each iteration.
So, you are looking to see how often it has separations within an increment, and with the higher level of diagnostics, you can see which nodes are separating, what the separation force was, etc... Then you can get a sense of the progress.
Is there much or anything to be gleaned from the default output? I have an ongoing model and I've attached a bottom-most snippet from the running f06 file (I stripped out the rows that were warning me that the solution would be out of core). Can anything be known from this in general terms? I'd like to know if the model is progressing or if it is wandering. The earlier suggestions will likely help but only with a new run, not with a model currently running.
There is some useful information to be gleaned from the f06 output... it is showing that the solution is progressing pretty well, in the sense that it took 5 iterations for it to converge at 50% of the total load, then it took 3 iterations at 60% and 70%... the fact that the load convergence criteria is already 'converged' at the first iteration (unless the default of 10% has been changed, but even so, it is less than 1%) implies the iterations are most likely from contact separations.
There should be another output file that has a .sts suffix... it is a more concise summary and can help you see what is going on... here is a sample:
You can see where there are a lot of iteration (cycles) and separations, as well as any load cut backs.
