General analysis workflows

Video: Analysis workflow

Before you begin an analysis, you should have a thorough understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. You should know which solver you will be using, what type of analysis you are performing, and what type of solution is needed.

The Pre/Post software is flexible, and enables a variety of workflows, depending on the modeling problem, your organization's standards, and personal preferences. Two basic workflows, however, will cover the majority of cases. These workflows differ primarily in how you create and manage physical, material, and mesh properties.

• In the workflow recommended for most models, you explicitly define all material, physical, and mesh properties in mesh collectors prior to meshing. You then assign meshes to the appropriate collector prior to creating boundary conditions and solving.This explicit workflow is useful for complex models consisting of multiple bodies, materials, and meshes, and helps ensure accuracy and completeness in fully defining your model.

• For simple models consisting of a single solid or surface body of one material, you can use the automated workflow to quickly define your FEM and simulation. This workflow takes advantage of property inheritance and commonly used default values to create mesh collectors automatically.

Pre/Post's flexible data structure enables you to extend the general workflows to reuse data and perform multiple analyses.

Working with multiple solutions

You can define multiple solutions for a single Simulation file. You can easily reuse defined boundary conditions by dragging and dropping them among the defined solutions and steps or subcases. When you use this technique, all solutions will use the same material and physical properties.

Working with multiple Simulation files

You can create multiple Simulations for a given FEM. This is useful for team-based analyses, complex loading, or what-if analyses. FEM reuse can significantly improve resource utilization. You can model the same FEM under different loading conditions.

When you are working in a Simulation file, you can define physical and material property “overrides.” Property overrides let you change the value of selected materials, physical properties, or element attributes, without requiring that you copy the entire mesh (FEM file). When you solve a model that contains an override, the software uses the values you modified in the override instead of the values you defined in the original model. For example, this allows you to use a single FEM model to perform a series of material studies, which saves disk space as well as modeling time and effort. You can also use overrides to quickly analyze the effect of varying the element thickness within a 2D mesh.

The graphic below shows an example of an element override that is used to vary the element thickness. When we initially created the original FEM file, we did not define a thickness value. However, we then created two different overrides in the files SIM1 and SIM2, in which we defined override values for the element thickness of 2mm and 2.5mm, respectively.

Working with multiple FEM files

You can create multiple FEM files for a given part file. You might want to create both a coarse and a fine mesh, for example. Or you might use a 1D mesh to solve for mode shapes and a 3D mesh for structural analysis. You can work with a single or multiple idealized parts. For example, if you want to create both a 2D and a 3D mesh of the same part, you might want to create two idealized parts: one with a midsurface and one without. Or you might want to create a coarse 3D mesh on a highly idealized part, and a fine mesh on an idealized part that retains more features of the master part.

• To associate the new FEM file with an existing idealized part, in the New FEM dialog box, select Associate to part and select the idealized part from the list of open parts. Or click Open and open the idealized part.

• To associate the new FEM file with a new idealized part, in the in the New FEM dialog box, select Associate to part and select the master part from the list of open parts. Create Idealized Part is selected by default. When you click OK, the software creates a new idealized part based on the master part.

How do I

Set the default environment

Edit the attributes for multiple selected entities

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Using the Show Only and Show Adjacent commands to control object display

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Working with datum planes in Pre/Post

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General analysis workflows, Simcenter 3D 2021.1 Series

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