ANSYS Tip of the Day (4) Create BEAM section files in ANSYS AP...

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feamech / April 13, 2012

Occasionally I still find its useful to go back to ANSYS APDL interface for certain
problems. Although with each new release of ANSYS Workbench, the needs to open
ANSYS APDL are getting less. Creating a model with BEAM element is one of those
occasions I feel the needs for ANSYS APDL. I heard with the help of ANSYS Design
Modeler, it is also easy to work with BEAM elements in Workbench, but since we dont
have a license for Design Modeler, I really cant comment on that.
I dont know since when the capability of drawing any geometry and creating a custom
section became available in ANSYS APDL. It is certainly a very handy tool. I used to use
CAD software (for example: SOLIDWORKS) to calculate the section properties, and
manually input them in ANSYS. I used Preprocessor -> Sections -> Beam -> Common
Sections to bring up Beam Tool, then scroll down to User Section under Sub-type

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ANSYS Tip of the Day (4) Create BEAM section files in ANSYS AP...

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I had to be really careful to make sure the axis referred by ANSYS match up correctly
with the CAD section property output. With the Custom Sections functionality, I can
easily create the cross section geometry as AREA in ANSYS:

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ANSYS Tip of the Day (4) Create BEAM section files in ANSYS AP...

http://www.feamech.com/ansys-tip-of-the-day-3-apply-load-directly-on...

Then use Preprocessor -> Sections -> Beam -> Custom Sections -> Write From Areas
to bring up the window to Select areas. A note comes up to remind me I may need to
specify mesh size:

Simply select all the areas I need to include in the cross section and click Done. It takes
ANSYS less than a second to mesh the section areas. Once its done, ANSYS prompts
me to save the section mesh to a file:

After writing the information to a file, ANSYS automatically delete the mesh.
This file is a text file and can be brought to any models containing BEAM element of the
cross section. To bring a section file to a model, Preprocessor -> Sections -> Custom
Sections -> Read Sect Mesh, this brings up the window below:

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Note that we do have an option to offset section node to locations other than BEAM
Section Centroid in case the line representing the BEAM is not drawn at the centroid. See
ANSYS help for command SECOFFSET for options available.
Of course, like all ANSYS APDL command, the above GUI procedures can be recreated
with ANSYS APDL command and make it easily programmable.

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April 13, 2012 in ANSYS Tip of the Day. Tags: ANSYS, ANSYS Mechanical, FEA, Workbench

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