In the current release of Abaqus/CAE, to create edge bases surface for shell elements – one has to pick the shell edges individually, which is a teadious procuedure. To easy out this process, we have created a plug-in which would allow the user to window pick the shell edges and create edge bases surfaces for the shell element. This plug-in would be very useful for defining shell to solid coupling and for defining any specific contact interaction involving shell edges. Please find attached the plug-in in this blog.

Procedure to step up the plug-in:

 1) Close Abaqus/CAE if opened.

 2) Unzip the attachment and place the “shelledge” folder in the “abaqus_plugins” folder.   (“abaqus_plugins” folder would be available in the Abaqus installation folder.)

 3) Start Abaqus/CAE. You can access the plug-in in the Assembly or Interaction Module from the “Plug-ins” drop down menu.

Procedure on how to use the plug-in:

 1)  In Assembly or Interaction Module, select “Plug-ins--> Shell Edge”

  2) Specify a name for the surface and click on "Pick Element Edges".

 3) To window pick only the free edges; user would need to select “Select from Exterior Entities" from the “SELECTION” toolbar (as highlighted below) so that it would only select shell free  edges.

4) After window picking the required shell edges, click “OK” in the dialog box and then “Done”.

5) Plug-in would have created a surface that would be listed under Surface Manager (as shown below)

Download the Plug-in here:

Note:    This Plug-in would only work for flattened input file that is imported into Abaqus/CAE. User can convert an input file in parts & assemblies to a flattened input deck in Abaqus/CAE by  selecting “Model--> Edit Attributes” from the main menu bar and by checking-in "Do not use parts and assemblies in input files".