element based surfaces from 2D/3D mesh

Hello all,

I have a question regarding the creation of surface element interfaces for Abaqus based on 2D/3D mesh. I am right now using HyperMesh 2020.2, the previous version I used was 2017. I see what previously was called surface groups now is called set segments and from this tab you can create element based surface interfaces for contact definition. However, I have a couple of issues:

- most of my interfaces are defined based on 3D tetramesh which works fine. For the most complex ones I extract 2D surface mesh form the underlying 3D elements (Tool --> Faces) and define the element based surface by organizing those 2D elements in a separate collector. The problem is that those segment sets seem to be associated only to those 2D elements and as soon as I delete them the defined surfaces disappear as well. This was not the case with 2017 version. Can someone please provide a solution. I need to keep the surfaces and 3D mesh and when exporting to have the associativity between them.

-the funny thing is that those surface elements defined on the mesh are no longer recognized as elements so for example I can't delete the from the F2 panel. Where did all this functionality go? How can I pick and delete single surface elements to trim the interfaces?

Hope I managed to explain my issues. If not - I can provide additional information. Thanks in advance.