Hi everyone, new Abaqus user, really hoping one of you can help me out.

For some time now I have been trying to get a simple compressive/tensile simulation running on a foam cylinder wrapped with carbon fiber for a university project. My issue is that there is too much deformation, more than carbon should deform, which I think is causing the two surfaces of the parts to overlap and mess up the contour plot. Here is an album of pictures: http://imgur.com/a/Hf2im

 Here is what I've been doing:

 1. Make 2 parts, one solid cylinder extrusion, one shell extrusion, of equal radius (.0381(m)), 1.5"

2. 8 pie slice partitions on both, in the same locations relative to the coordinate system. 2 partitions on each end for loads and BC

3. Solid, homogenous section for the core part. Density 24, Youngs 11.75MPa, Poisson's 0. I've also tried putting in the crushable foam properties from the tutorial in "getting started".

Make a conventional shell composite layup on the shell part. Reference a cylindrical coordinate system, normal axis 2, entire shell for region, thickness .0001542m (I think this is where its messing up), 45, -45, 0 orientation. Then i offset from the bottom surface because that usually makes the best results. The material properties for my carbon are:

Density 865.5

Elastic, Lamina

E1 181Gpa, E2 10.3Gpa, Poisson's .28,  G12,13,23 7.17GPa

4. Make independent instances of both the shell and core, auto offset

5. Use a Tie constraint, Choose purple for the inside of the shell as the master surface (I thought this because the shell experiences the loads later on), and the outside of the core as the slave surface

6. Make a surface traction load on the partitioned end segment of the shell, General traction, 0,0,1 vector, magnitude of 10.

7. Make a BC for U3 on the other partitioned end of the shell, make a BC for U1, U2 at the center of the end of the core part.

8. Translate the core instance to line up with the shell.

9. Mesh as fine as I can on student edition

10. Run

For a while I thought that somewhere in the translation process it was not lining up by some infinitesimal amount, so I made sets and surfaces for the tie, load, and BC on the part level, then instanced the parts on top of each-other with no offset. No luck.

One thing that bugs me is that the core section never shows any color other than blue, even when its deformed. Maybe I'm not accurately describing the stiffness?

This same issue happens no matter the magnitude of the load, .1 or 1000

Increasing the thickness has the largest effect on the contour plot

 Tried switching to mm, tonnes, and Mpa. No luck

 Went to a campus computer lab and made a version with a billion nodes, no luck.

Thank you!

Alex