Hello everyone!

I've encountered a strange issue in a simple 2D orthogonal cutting simulation with Abaqus/Explicit. Of course, material removal is used and I have to account for surface erosion (contact between the cutting tool and the elements exposed when their outer neighbors are deleted). I've tried doing it as described in the documentation (creating a SURFERODE surface and setting proper contact inclusions for general contact) but it didn't work as expected. So I decided to just follow various YouTube tutorials about 2D orthogonal cutting and used a contact pair instead of general contact. This contact pair was defined in such a way that the master surface is the analytical rigid surface of the cutting tool while the secondary surface is a node region where I selected the geometrical face with elements to be cut (top part of the screenshot). I was expecting this to work normally (like in the tutorials) but, surprisingly, there is an error about excessively distorted elements before the actual calculation is started as Abaqus apparently uses the strain-free adjustment even when the gap between the workpiece and cutting tool is large (bottom part of the screenshot). I've got no idea why this happens and how to prevent it. The documentation chapter "Contact Initialization for Contact Pairs in Abaqus/Explicit" mentions only overclosures and the *CLEARANCE keyword but it can be used only for small-sliding contact. What should I do to avoid this issue?