Thank you, this was helpful.
Your picture simulation is exactly what I'm looking for. A weighted link seems to be the best option.
To answer a few of your questions, no I am not considering buckling. We do the hand calcs for this to see if its close. Most of the components I work with are short enough where this is not an issue. If it is close with the hand calculations, we then need to confirm with FEA.
Most of the components I work with have burst as the failure mode, but his specific instance collapse was also under question.
Going forward I will plan on using exclusion to prevent singularities from altering my results and simulating threads with weighted links. Thanks for the help!
-Andrew