You can use the restart files created by ABAQUS to continue an analysis from a specified step of a previous analysis. This section describes how you control the output of restart data. For a discussion of how you use the restart data in a subsequent job, see “Restarting an analysis,” Section 18.4, and “What are the model attributes?,” Section 9.2.2.
By default, no restart information is written for an ABAQUS/Standard analysis and restart information is written only at the beginning and end of each step for an ABAQUS/Explicit analysis. However, default restart requests are created automatically for every step in an analysis. The Edit Restart Requests dialog box, invoked by selecting Output
Restart Requests from the main menu bar in the Step module, allows you to specify how often you want the restart information to be written.
You can specify the frequency at which ABAQUS writes data to the restart files; however, the behavior of restart differs between ABAQUS/Standard and ABAQUS/Explicit.
ABAQUS/Standard
For an ABAQUS/Standard analysis the frequency is in increments. In addition, ABAQUS/Standard writes restart information at the end of the step regardless of whether the last increment corresponds to the specified frequency. By default, the frequency is set to zero, which means that ABAQUS/Standard does not write any information to the restart files during the step.
ABAQUS/Explicit
For an ABAQUS/Explicit analysis the frequency is in time intervals. In addition, for an ABAQUS/Explicit step you can choose whether the output is written at the exact time interval or at the closest approximation. However, you cannot avoid writing information to the restart files for ABAQUS/Explicit steps; if you set the frequency to zero for an ABAQUS/Explicit step, restart information will be written only at the end of the step.
You can request that data written to the restart files overlay data from the previous increment. If you select this option, ABAQUS retains the information from only one increment of each step in the restart files, thus minimizing the size of the files. By default, ABAQUS does not overlay data.
For more information, see “Restarting an analysis,” Section 18.4, and “Restarting an analysis,” Section 9.1.1 of the ABAQUS Analysis User's Manual. For detailed instructions on requesting restart output, see “Configuring restart output requests,” Section 14.13.2.
You can use the abaqus restartjoin execution procedure to extract data from the output database created by a restart analysis and append the data to a second output database. For more information, see “Execution procedure for joining output database (.odb) files from restarted analyses,” Section 3.2.16 of the ABAQUS Analysis User's Manual.
