Hi everyone,

talking about 3dx Simulia, I'm looking for a way to improve my model building skills.

In particular, I have to define some contact pair and TIE on a bolted joint. As my joint has 15 solid bolts, I need to define TIE contacts on thread parts and nonlinear contact pairs for bolts head-joint and joint to joint surfaces for each bolt...this is such a time consuming and annoying action!

I'm looking for something simililar to Automation-> "Object generator" in Ansys Mechanical: in there I can define "named sections" and with just creating one TIE or Contact pair I can define them on all my named selection automatically.

Is there a way to do that also in Simulia (define just a single object and then automatically repeating it in my model)? 

I know the virtual bolt could be a solution here, but I need to model my bolt with solid elements.

thanks!