I have a large assembly with multiple contact surfaces.  The model will solve with a very coarse mesh.  When I refine the mesh in high stress areas, the solution will not converge.  I am using FFEPlus and when I look at the convergence plot in the solver, it bounces around near the convergence limit.

In the solver, there is a place to enter max. steps and convergence limits, but they do not do anything.  I will set them and come back later to look at them and they have reverted to defaults.  I have also tried to cancel the solution, get the popup to save results and say "yes", but the results are not saved.  The only way I can terminate the solution is to go into the Task Manager and end the star.exe process.

I have tried DirectSparse and that does not converge either.

Is there anyway to set the convergence limit or maximum number of steps to stop the solution so I can see the results after a certain point?  Ant other suggestions?

Thanks,

Pete Osgood

I ended up making the mesh more coarse and adding springs to stabilize the parts.