Let's say I have a metal part with some known stress profile. I want to cut some chunk of the part off and measure how the part deforms, due to its stress profile, in response to this cut.

Is there a way to do this natively in Abaqus? Would a valid approach be to just delete some elements in the part's mesh along the cutting path? Might there be a better way than this naive element deletion method? Are there any recommended resources discussing such techniques?