Hello everyone,

I am performing general static analysis of a knitted unit cell (view figure below), in the cut shown the elements are initially overlapped, I am trying to use an interference fit and after apply a displacement in each direction. The nodes at top, bottom, front and back faces are constrained using equations to achieve periodicity in the analysis. For the contact analysis, the normal behaviour is hard contact and for friction, a penalty of 0.15 is used. Should I use one step with an interference fit and in another apply the displacement? What is the correct way to simulate the contact of the mentioned structure?

Thank's for your help.