I am trying to model a rubber material first subjected to a large compressive normal force (eg; a pencil being pressed into an eraser), followed by a shear force (eg; the pencil being dragged horizontally while being pressed into the eraser). It is a 2D model and I am using CPE4R element type, explicit modeling, surface-to-surface contact (penalty, fric coeff = 0.3) and ALE adaptive meshing.

The ALLAE/ALLIE ratio is good for the normal force case, but increases exponentially until it reaches 1 (i.e. possible hourglassing?) and aborts due to excessive distortion. I am unable to use CPE4 as it is only available for standard models. What are some things that I can try to solve this issue, in addition to making the mesh finer (it is already very fine and takes hours to solve)?

Abaqus ​​​​​​​