Free body cuts display the resultant forces and moments transmitted across a selected surface of your model. Free body cuts simply integrate the internal forces in an element over a section; therefore, they cannot be used accurately across sections containing surface tractions due to cohesive contact or other sources. The Free Body toolset is available only in the Visualization module, and you can create a free body cut only when the current step and frame of the output database includes element force nodal output (NFORC).

This chapter explains how to use the Free Body toolset to create and delete free body cuts, display or hide them in the viewport, and customize several aspects of their appearance. The following topics are covered:

• “Resultant forces and moments on free body cuts in Abaqus/CAE,” Section 67.1

• “Creating or editing a free body cut,” Section 67.2

• “Selection methods for free body cross-sections,” Section 67.3

• “Displaying, hiding, and highlighting free body cuts,” Section 67.4

• “Customizing free body cut display,” Section 67.5

Abaqus/CAE provides two other methods for displaying free body data:

• You can display resultant forces and moments along an arbitrary plane through your model by toggling on free body display for a planar view cut. For more information, see “Understanding view cuts,” Section 80.1.

• You can display the free body nodal forces in a symbol plot to determine which nodes have an imbalance of forces or moments due to applied loads or to visualize the nodal force distribution on internal sections. For more information, see “Producing a symbol plot of free body nodal forces,” Section 45.4.