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We started an email newsletter back in 2002 as “The Focus.” We kept that up for some time and then made the plunge into blogging around 2008. Over the years, thousands of students and engineers from around the world have told us that our blog is an invaluable tool to them. If you can’t find what you are looking for, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Using the Usermat UPF to Define Custom ANSYS Mechanical Materials on Windows

A longstanding capability in Ansys Mechanical is the ability to add your own user-defined material with the Usermat function. The Usermat.f routine is one of many user-programmable features (UPFs) in...

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Applying an Average Temperature in Ansys Mechanical

In a recent tech support call, a user asked our team if they knew of a way to apply a constraint that kept the average temperature at some point to a specified value. They had a relatively coarse th...

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Static Equivalent Model Reduction in Ansys Mechanical

Editor's note: Content revised on 10/21/1024 The original version of this post incorrectly estimated the isolated cantilever (Equation (5) of slide 5) deflection using shear and moment estimates (...

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Thin-Wall Rectangular Pressure Vessels Simulation

Most pressure vessels are designed to be cylindrical for a reason. It minimizes deformation and stress concentration and is the optimal shape for maximum pressure load relative to material volume. B...

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Simulating Enforced Motion in Ansys Mechanical Structural Dynamics Problems

Back in engineering school, most of us studied the classical dynamics solution for a harmonic oscillator subject to a base motion. Although there are four different ways to model this situation in An...

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Python/PyAnsys Tutorial: Mapping Data in Ansys Mechanical

One of the great things about Ansys Mechanical is that there are always several ways to do something. And, with the growth of PyAnsys there are even more. In a recent training class, we were asked t...

Geometric Singularities in Finite Element Problems

A singularity in math is not a good thing. It is something that some mathematicians spend their careers dealing with, especially for differential equations. Since Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is...

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Calculating Reaction Forces in a Spectrum Analysis in ANSYS Mechanical

Calculating the Reaction Force on an Ansys Mechanical structural or vibration model is an important step in not just verifying your model, but it may also be a key output of the simulation. However,...

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Thermal PID Controller and Thermostat: Control Your Models with 2 New Ansys Mechanical Extensions

THERMAL PID CONTROLLER ACT Extension (Rev 1)Formerly “PID Thermostat Controller” THERMOSTAT ACT Extension (Rev 0) The user community has continued to use and provide feedback on various Ans...

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PyAnsys Scripting: Importing Geometry and Mapping Model Load Data from Rhino to Ansys

PADT's Alex Grishin is back with another useful article on how he is using the Ansys scripting python API, PyAnsys to do cool things in Ansys Mechanical. This presentation is actually something he di...