Description: Initial contact clearances can be specified to remove initial overclosures or to create initial gaps between contacting surfaces.

The default algorithm to remove initial contact overclosures cannot resolve deep penetrations of surfaces defined on solid elements or separate tangled shell surfaces—you must direct the algorithm to resolve these overclosures by specifying a zero clearance between specific portions of the interacting surfaces.

In cases where two curved surfaces have precise initial clearances, the discretization of each surface determines the initial gap between each slave node and its closest point on the opposing surface (see Figure 11–8). In this case a clearance must be defined to “correct” the discretized geometry and to satisfy the initial clearance conditions.