Trying to do an analysis of two parts to see how they threads interact. Made the thread flank faces a no penetration contact set with a small gap between them. The analysis runs, but gets to a point where it seems to get into a loop and will not complete. Do I need to break the thread surfaces into several smaller contact sets? Looking for suggestions.
A picture and more definition about what you want to learn would be helpful. There are a lot of threads about modeling of threads and what you'll see is that generally it is recommended to simplify threads to face to face bonded contacts or use bolt connectors. When it comes to modeling of threads your approach is correct but I suspect will be challenging to solve. We did a few projects where we did 2d axisymmetric analyses to evaluate threads and that is what I would recommend as a starting point for you as well. 3d will be quite challenging.