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*STEP

Keyword type: step

This card describes the start of a new STEP. PERTURBATION, NLGEOM and INC are the only optional parameters.

The parameter PERTURBATION is allowed for *FREQUENCY and *BUCKLE steps only. If it is specified, the last *STATIC step is taken as reference state and used to calculate the stiffness matrix. This means the inclusion of previous deformations (large deformation stiffness) and the inclusion of previous loads as preloads (stress stiffness), taking the temperatures into account to determine the material properties. The loads active (mechanical and thermal) are those specified in the perturbation step. The displacements and stresses are those corresponding to the eigenmodes. At the end of the step the perturbation load is reset to zero.

The loading active in a nonperturbative step is the accumulation of the loading in all previous steps since but not including the last perturbation step (or, if none has occurred, since the start of the calculation), unless OP=NEW has been specified since.

If NLGEOM is specified, the calculation takes geometrically nonlinear effects into account. To this end a nonlinear strain tensor is used (Lagrangian strain for hyperelastic materials, Eulerian strain for deformation plasticity and the deviatoric elastic left Cauchy-Green tensor for incremental plasticity), the step is divided into increments and a Newton iteration is performed within each increment. Although the internally used stresses are the Piola stresses of the second kind, they are transformed into Cauchy (true) stresses before being printed. In the present version of the program geometrically nonlinear calculations only apply to static calculations, and consequently the *STATIC or *DYNAMIC keyword card should be used within the step. The latter card also allows for the specification of the step size and increment size. The maximum number of increments in the step (for automatic incrementation) can be specified by using the parameter INC (default is 10). Once the NLGEOM parameter has been selected, it remains active in all subsequent static calculations. Analyses involving nonlinear materials automatically trigger the NLGEOM option. Thus, for these types of analysis nonlinear geometric effects are always taken into account.

First and only line:

- *STEP
- Enter any needed parameters and their values

    Example:

    *STEP,INC=100

starts a step and increases the maximum number of increments to complete the step to 100.

Example files: beamnlp.

Next: *SURFACE Up: Input deck format Previous: *STATIC Contents