The Residuals page in the Job Diagnostics dialog box displays information about the quantities that ABAQUS/Standard uses to determine whether an iteration has produced an equilibrium solution.

Residuals represent the difference between the internal and external forces acting on a model. If the residuals are small, ABAQUS accepts the iteration as converged. The tolerances used to determine whether a solution is converged are very important. The tolerances must be small enough to provide an accurate solution but large enough to achieve the solution within a reasonable number of iterations. Before accepting an iteration as converged, ABAQUS further requires that corrections to the primary solution variables and constraint equation compatibility errors must also be small.

When the equilibrium iterations do not converge, the node where the maximum residual occurs during the final iterations is usually the best place to begin searching for the problem. There are many conditions that may prevent the equilibrium iterations from converging; diagnosing the source of the problem requires a certain amount of experience.

Select Highlight selections in viewport to locate problematic regions of your model in the current viewport. Your selections in the Equations, Variables, and Details fields determine the region that is highlighted in the viewport and the quantity that is associated with the highlighted region.