June 7, 2021 at 5:54 pm
Ansys Employee
Deactivated Freedoms in time domain calculations may not be the most rigorous approach to restricting a structure's motion, due to the way in which the freedom deactivation is applied. The change in position that you see is basically the sum of numerical round-off errors over a large number of time steps. Deactivated Freedoms are usually more appropriate for stability analyses, where we are iterating towards convergence of the forces acting on each structure.
A better approach for this workflow may be to use an arrangement of Fenders between Fixed Points and the pile guide. To restrict motions to Z and RZ only, you will need 8 Fenders on each pile guide, arranged as shown:


I hope this helps; please let me know if you have any further questions.
Cheers, Mike