Abaqus contact property models define the normal, tangential, thermal, electrical, pore-fluid, and user-defined behavior of interacting surfaces.
How They Work
By default, contact resists penetration in the normal direction. A contact property can add hard or softened pressure-overclosure behavior, contact damping, friction, user-defined interfacial constitutive behavior, breakable bonds, pressure penetration, surface-based cohesive behavior, thermal conductance, heat generation, electrical conductance, or pore-fluid transfer.
The contact property is assigned to a contact pair or to a region of a general contact domain. This separates the geometric contact definition from the interface law.
Why It Matters
The contact surfaces determine where interaction can occur; the contact property determines what interaction means physically. Friction, damping, cohesive behavior, and coupled-field transfer can dominate nonlinear response.