Summary

Your choice of element type has important consequences regarding the accuracy and efficiency of your simulation. The elements available in Abaqus/Explicit are (in general) a subset of those available in Abaqus/Standard.

The degrees of freedom active at a node depend on the element types attached to the node.

The element name completely identifies the element's family, formulation, number of nodes, and type of integration.

All elements must refer to a section property definition. The section property provides any additional data required to define the geometry of the element and also identifies the associated material property definition.

For continuum elements Abaqus defines the element output variables, such as stress and strain, with respect to the global Cartesian coordinate system. You can change to a local material coordinate system.

For three-dimensional shell elements Abaqus defines the element output variables with respect to a coordinate system based on the surface of the shell. You can define a local material coordinate system.

For computational efficiency any part of a model can be defined as a rigid body, which has degrees of freedom only at its reference node.

As a method of constraint in an Abaqus/Explicit analysis, rigid bodies are computationally more efficient than multi-point constraints.