Ansys Tips

Livin' ON a Prayer * In the few tingling seconds between saving the project and hitting Solve on Ansys, I would mutter a prayer under my breath. There is always an indescribable brief sense of helplessness and hope. Non-linear problems are tough because... they are nonlinear! A small nudge can have disproportional effects.  Learning how to solve non-linear problems takes patience and luck. Here are some resources which I found useful in my journey in learning the secret arts (in no particular order): 1. CAEAI: Best Practices ( link ) ( backup_link ) 2. Joseph Metrisin 1 : contact convergence debugging guidelines ( link ) ( backup_link ) 3. Rod Scholl: contact analysis guidelines ( link ) ( backup_link ) 4. Ansys: Could you give me tips and tricks for Non-linear simulations? ( link ) 5. John Higgins: Obtaining and Optimizing Structural Analysis Convergence ( link ) 6. PADT: Overcoming Convergence Difficulties (Part I & II ) 7. Ansys: Snap Fit Analysis - Be

I gushed about the ACT console in a previous post . Here's another example of automatically populating some post processing objects for all time steps inside Mechanical after a solve.  Copy-and-paste it in Mechanical ACT Console Command Line, then hit the Enter key. Text file of script: Link . # Extracts at each time step... # x, y, z stress components, von Mises stress, max principal stress, total deformation, and x, y, z normal deformation components numsteps = ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Analyses[0].AnalysisSettings.NumberOfSteps for ct in range(numsteps): setTime = str(ct+1) + " [s]" nowTime = str(ct+1) + "s" # Normal Stresses sx=ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Analyses[0].Solution.AddNormalStress() sx.NormalOrientation =NormalOrientationType.XAxis sx.DisplayTime=Quantity(setTime) sx.Name = "Normal Stress X at "+nowTime sy=ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Analyses[0].Solution.AddNormalStress() sy.NormalOrientat