The tie constraint was used in Abaqus/CAE to connect solid
element components together (C3D4 elements to C3D4 elements).
The cross members’ wire elements were connected to the face of
the base side rails using the coupling constraint (B31 elements to
C3D4 elements). The edges of the wall and roof were connected
to the container components using a shell-to-solid coupling (S4
and S3 elements to C3D4 elements).
The rear assembly of doors and locking assembly were replaced
by a wall very similar to the front wall. However, the new rear
wall’s length was slightly longer and had a sloped bottom edge
in order to connect into the door sill.
Models 1 and 2 were identical except Model 2 replaced many of
the simplified container cross sections with cross sections similar
to Fig. 6. Model 3 had similar beam wire components as Model 2
with the addition of corner fittings and more detailed models for
the walls and roof. Models 4 and 5 increased the container’s complexity
and were comparable to the container model in Fig. 6. Model
5 was exactly the same as Model 4 but with a finer mesh for the
walls and roof. The walls and roof had corrugated profiles with uniform
shell mesh configurations. The cross members which support
the wooden floor were created and meshed using B31 beam elements
in Abaqus/CAE . The corner fittings and every container
component (excluding the walls and roof) were created in Solid-
Works, uniformly meshed in Hypermesh with C3D4 linear
tetrahedral elements (3D), and then imported into Abaqus/
CAE [19]. The walls and roof were created in SolidWorks [17],
meshed in Hypermesh using S3 linear triangular elements
and S4 linear quadrilateral elements (2D), and imported into Abaqus/
CAE . The element designation for a shipping container is
shown in Fig. 8, and a close-up view of the corner fittings can be
found in Fig. 18