## Distributed Coupling Element for Stress Analysis

The distributed coupling element connects the degrees-of-freedom at a slave node with those at one or several master nodes, according to the master node weights. Which degrees-of-freedom (dof) are coupled, depends on the dof specification.

Because the number of connected nodes is not fixed, the element connectivity has to be enclosed by square brackets "[" and "]". The slave node is specified first, followed by the master nodes. For mesh-independent definitions, the master nodes can be specified by means of nodesets.

elements   ..   type FMDE element-id "[" [dof dof] slave-node-id     [weight w] nodeset nodeset-id     [weight w] epatch epatch-id e1-e12|f1-f7|b     [weight w] master-node-id     ...   "]"   ... end

The degrees-of-freedom to be coupled can be specified optionally, by means of the dof option. It takes an integer number which contains the digits 1-6, corresponding to the UX, UY, UZ, RX, RY, RZ degrees-of-freedom. For example, 123 means all displacement degrees-of-freedom, and 123456 (default) means all displacement and rotation degrees-of-freedom.

If weight is specified (default is 1.0), it will be applied to any subsequent master nodes until a new weight is specified.