The Ansys Program Organization

The Ansys program contains a sequence of statements in four groups. They can be typed from the graphical interface or read from a batch file. You can use either upper or lower for Ansys, but I use upper case for Ansys commands and lower case for my symbols.
The header section gives the title that will appear on your grahpics.
          /TITLE, Your name, MENG 421, date here, axial1.a
          ! comments follow an exclamation point
The preprocessor section defining the model
         /PREP7
           . . .
         FINISH
The solution section defining the boundary conditions and calculating the primary solution
         /SOLUTION
         . . .
         FINISH
The post processor section providing additions data
         /POST1
         . . .
         FINISH
Let's look at each of these four groups in more detail.

The header section has the title that will appear on your grahpics.
Always include a /TITLE command with your name, the date, and the file name that will appear on the plot.
Use frequent comments to explain the various commands. Comments follow an exclamation point.
In the Preprocessor section, /PREP7, you create three tables describing the properties of the elements. Then you define the nodes and the elements.

The element types, ET
The real constants, R
The material properties, MP
The nodes, N
The elements, E

Several nodes can be created at once with the NGEN command.
Similarly, several elements can be created at once with the EGEN command.
In the Solution section, /SOLUTION, you define the loads and the constraints.
Constraints are defined with the D command.
Loads are defined with the F (concentrated), SFBEAM (beam), and SF (general surface) commands.

Additional Ansys source files are available in the following directories on the Tech file server:

~es421/class/ (Linux)
C:\Program Files\Ansys inc\ansys57\data\verif (Windows 2000)

MENG 421 | Ansys index | Nodes and Elements | Element-Property Tables | Class assignments