To create contact controls for surface-to-surface contact and self-contact interactions, select InteractionContact ControlsCreate from the main menu bar. A Create Contact Controls dialog box appears in which you can specify a name for the contact controls and the type of contact controls that you want to create. Once you have specified this information, click Continue to display the contact controls editor.
Warning: Contact controls are intended for advanced users. The default settings of these controls are appropriate for most analyses. Using nondefault values of these controls may greatly increase the computational time of the analysis or produce inaccurate results. Changing these settings in an ABAQUS/Standard analysis may also cause convergence problems.
Each contact controls editor displays the name and type of the contact controls that you are defining in the top panel of the dialog box. The format of the rest of the editor varies depending on whether you are defining controls for an ABAQUS/Standard or an ABAQUS/Explicit analysis.
You can display help on a particular feature of the editor by selecting HelpOn Context from the main menu bar and then clicking the feature of interest. For more information, see Specifying contact controls in an ABAQUS/Standard analysis, Section 15.12.3, and Specifying contact controls in an ABAQUS/Explicit analysis, Section 15.12.4.