The Use of User Defined Elements and Extra Degrees of Freedom

The capabilities of the LS-DYNA® User Defined Features, allowing for modifications to LS-DYNA analyses, are powerful. It would be impractical to fully exercise their extensive capabilities, and so many of the features have also not been fully documented. Specifically, several undocumented actions are required to use User Defined Elements, when using extra degrees of freedom. This brief paper will explain the additional steps required for the LS-DYNA integrator to update the extra degrees of freedom, when using User Defined Elements. Additional details of extra degrees of freedom usage will also be given.