Visualisation of User Defined Finite Elements with ABAQUS / Viewer

Commercial finite element (FE) software packages provide interfaces for user defined subroutines, e.g. to define a user defined material behaviour or special purpose finite elements, respectively. Regarding the latter, the major drawback of user defined elements in Abaqus is that they can not be visualised with the standard post-processing tool Abaqus/Viewer. The reason for this is that the element topology is hidden inside the element subroutine. The software tool presented within this contribution closes this gap in order to utilise the powerful Abaqus postprocessing potentials. Because only elements from the Abaqus element library can be visualised with Abaqus/ Viewer, the user elements in the output data bases resulting from FE calculations are replaced with properly chosen elements from the Abaqus standard element library. Furthermore, user element related data are taken from the binary results files and transferred consistently to these standard elements. This is done by means of the Abaqus Python scripting interface and requires the provision of additional user defined information concerning the element topology. The capabilities of this software tool are demonstrated with user defined elements developed for non-local damage mechanics, gradient elasticity, cohesive zone models and ferroelectricity.