Hi All,

I have performed a simulation in Abaqus/Explicit, which includes material failure and element deletion, and I would like to import the deformed mesh into a new analysis for use in Abaqus/Standard. I have tried this with a toy problem that has one deleted element in the center of a necked tension specimen:

however, when I try to import this configuration from the odb file, the previously deleted element remains:

I know that I could use *Restart to write the necessary .abq files to import a pre-defined material state, but I would like to do this process for every saved increment, 100+ time steps, and if I saved all of those steps in restart files for my much larger problem, I would quickly use up all available disk space on our HPC cluster. Also, for what I want to simulate, I don't need any of the other material state information that is kept by the .abq files.

Since the ODB file clearly has the deformed mesh information, is there a way that I can use just the .odb file directly and obtain the deformed mesh without deleted elements (Elements with STATUS=0), and avoid needing to save the large .abq files? 

 Thank you!