To create interactions, select Interaction
Create from the main menu bar. A Create Interaction dialog box appears in which you can provide a name for the interaction, select the step in which the interaction will be created, and choose the type of the interaction.
When you click Continue in the Create Interaction dialog box after selecting any interaction type except general contact, you are prompted to select the regions to which to apply the interaction. Once you have selected the region or regions, an interaction editor appears in which you can specify additional information about the interaction, such as the interaction property that you want to associate with the interaction. For general contact interactions, the interaction editor appears when you click Continue in the Create Interaction dialog box. For example, the general contact editor for ABAQUS/Explicit analyses is shown in Figure 15–3.
Each interaction editor displays the current step and the name and type of the interaction that you are defining in the top panel of the dialog box. The format of the rest of the editor varies depending on the type of interaction you are defining.
Once you have created an interaction, you can modify the interaction in the following ways:
You can modify some or all of the data that you entered in the editor when you created the interaction.
You can use the Interaction Manager to modify the stepwise history of the interaction. (For more information, see “What are step-dependent managers?,” Section 3.4.2.)
You can display information on a particular editor feature by selecting HelpOn Context from the main menu bar and then clicking the editor feature of interest.
