Hi all,

I am attempting to model the distension of a reinforced cylindrical rubber tube that is under pressure. Despite being axisymmetric this part must be modeled in 3D due to the presence of the fibre reinforcement families that run in the longitudinal and hoop directions (more background here).

Some of my pressures are too large for the program to model without crashing, so I'm attempting to use mesh-to-mesh solution mapping as a workaround. I'm modeling in Abaqus/Standard and the documentation tells me that ALE adaptive meshing is a poor choice for hyperelastic materials.

First I make a new part using the deformed configuration of the initial part's .odb file, which gives me an orphan mesh of the deformed part. Then I use Plug-ins->Create geometry from mesh to assign a geometry to the orphan mesh. This brings me to my problem: the resulting part appears to be an amalgamation of thousands of smaller tetragonal elements, which I cannot work with at all. Any attempt to select an edge (e.g. to create a set for measuring displacement) by clicking and dragging a box over a portion of the part appears to select the entire part as a default (shown below). Abaqus also does not recognize any groups of elements as coherent surfaces either, meaning I cannot easily highlight surfaces (e.g. to apply boundary conditions or loads). I also haven't even bothered trying to apply my cyclic symmetry conditions or discrete orientation for specifying the fibre directions later.

So I suppose I really am asking 2 questions: 1) Is 3D mesh-to-mesh solution mapping even viable for this scenario? There is extremely limited info on performing solution mapping for 3D parts as most examples I've seen online are for 2D axisymmetric models. And 2) If mesh-to-mesh solution mapping is indeed viable, how can I remedy the problems I am currently experiencing? Is there a way for me to mass-select large groups of the remeshed tetragonal elements so that I can apply boundary conditions to surfaces?

Thanks to all in advance.