John Doyle
Ansys Employee
There is no node-to-node equivalent to CONTA178 element available directly inside WB-Mechanical, but that is not to say you cannot get this to work with the command object you are using. Something is obviously different between the two, but you should be able to calibrate Mechanical to get it to work like MAPDL
The first thing I would check the shell normal directions that are used in MAPDL vs Mechanical. Are they consistent?
It could also be the Analysis Settings (number of substeps, Large Deformation vs Small Deformation..etc).
If none of the above suggestions are helpful, try comparing the solve.out (saved to the solver directory in Mechanical) with the equivalent file that you can create in MAPDL.
Just type '/OUT,solve,out' before you execute the SOLVE in MAPDL and it will create same type of file.
This will report all the element and solver spec, and solution history with warnings and errors also recorded.