Ansys Tips

Photo by  James Owen  on  Unsplash A surprisingly popular blog-post written here is Exporting Stiffness Matrix from Ansys . A sensible follow up question is what can one do with the exported stiffness matrix? In a recent Xansys Forum post, a question was raised on how we can edit the stiffness matrix of a superelement and use it for our model.  An approach presented below is to first create a superelement that has the same number of DOF and nodal location that will serve as a template. An APDL script can then be written to edit the stiffness matrix entries as desired before exporting to a new superelement *.SUB file for use in future models. The self-contained script below demonstrates this.  /prep7 et ,1, 185 mp , ex, 1, 200e3 mp , prxy, 1, 0.33 w = 0.1 ! single element (note nodal locations) n , 1, w, -w, -w n , 2, w, w, -w n , 3, -w, w, -w n , 4, -w, -w, -w n , 5, w, -w, w n , 6, w, w, w n , 7, -w, w, w n , 8, -w, -w, w e , 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 /solu anty...

CMS circa 2019R3 Roughly a year ago, I wrote about how you could reuse CMS elements using APDL snippets within Ansys Mechanical. The new feature of Condensed Geometry in recent releases unfortunately does not completely solve the problem; but does get you half way there. To recap, the goal here is to have a part (A) that is complicated/ huge  but now condensed into a teeny-tiny Super-Element. Changes can be quickly made to other parts (B). When combined together (C/D), the model as a whole is smaller and faster to solve since A is reused. This blog post is an update to the earlier post that uses the same technique but takes advantage of two new tools:  Condensed Geometry & Mesh Numbering . To get started, download the Ansys 2019R3 archived file to follow along. Archived File with RST ( 177.0MB )    Link  or Archived File without RST ( 1.5MB )   Link The rough procedure: Create and mesh both Analysis A for CMS part and Analysis B fo...

Fig 1: Project Schematic With the release of Mechanical 19.2, substructuring is now available for Modal & Rigid Dynamics without scripting. That just made my  earlier post on CMS outdated! Note that there is still a key limitation where Generation and Expansion Pass must be performed on your local machine. To get ahead of the game a bit, here is a way to do Harmonic Analysis extending on previous work . (Please go through that before this post). Some points of note: The method of merging the CMS and non-CMS models together into System C is the same. All files related to the superelement has to be copied over to the solver file directory as before. Modal analysis need not be performed first as the example here uses Full Method instead of Modal Superposition for simplicity.  The script expands the responses the same way as Modal Analysis does so the script will look familiar. Command Snippet for Combined Analysis D !!!!! Save full model fini /filnam...

Precise Mass Summary Output One of the many checks one can do in FEA is to compute the mass, inertia and center of gravity. Besides doing this for the normal models, it can quickly extract out the mass and inertia of the superelement ( SE ) to verify the MATRIX50  that you're bringing in  has the same mass and inertia as the genuine article. If the mass comes in too low, try specifying more modes in  CMSOPT  to see if it fixes it. My previous co-worker also came across intermittent issues with using constraints equation ( CE ) inside a superelement. He replaced it with really stiff beams instead before generating the superelement. Personally, I would take a bit of time to select master nodes ( M ) not just at the connections but at various points on the model to properly capture the modal mass. This would be similar to identifying accelerometer locations on your part to properly identify modes of interest for a modal test. Here's the command to calcul...