This chapter discusses features related to contact and interaction modeling. It provides an overview of the following enhancements:

• “General contact in Abaqus/Standard,” Section 11.1

• “Automatic contact damping for surfaces initially touching at a single point,” Section 11.2

• “Small-sliding, surface-to-surface contact formulation improvements,” Section 11.3

• “Scaling tangential contact stiffness in perturbation steps,” Section 11.4

• “Surface-based cohesive contact and damage in Abaqus/CAE,” Section 11.5

• “Enhancements to edge-to-edge contact tracking in Abaqus/Explicit,” Section 11.6

• “Contact status output,” Section 11.7

• “Improved contact stress output for surfaces based on second-order elements,” Section 11.8