I'm trying to figure out a linear contact problem in SOL101. My model is a structure where some constraints are allowed to move up to a limit, after which they react like they have a linear spring applied to them. My solution cannot be in SOL400 due to customer requirements, and I have a permanent-glue contact which prevents me from using SOL106 and simply throwing gap elements at the problem.
I'm not a regular user of contact analysis, so a lot of my issues are learning-curve-related. However, I pulled down the tutorial on www.mscsoftware.com/.../steel-plate-contact to develop some familiarity before I apply the contact to my model.
The tutorial problem is not solving. Nastran gives me a fatal error:
*** USER FATAL MESSAGE 4551 (nl3con)
*** STOPPED PROBLEM DUE TO FAILED CONVERGENCE.
*** JOB DOES NOT CONVERGE AT THE CURRENT TIME STEP OR INCREMENT.
*** SOLUTION DIVERGES FOR SUBCASE 1 STEP 0.
Since the solution was using default parameters with 10 load steps, I increased to 40 load steps and kept getting the same error. Since I'm using a tutorial, I assume that the problem is well-posed and should solve if set up properly, so I can only assume I didn't set something up correctly when I sent it to Nastran.
Are there any ideas as to what I set up wrong, so that I can move forward on my analysis?
