Automating Surface and Edge guided Element Orientation in Mechanical

Hello,

I am working on a hydrogen diffusion project, wherein I have a microstructure with multiple grains and inflated grain boundaries that are the diffusion pathways within my structure.

Diffusion within these inflated grain boundaries are anisotropic. As such, I need to assign element orientations for each grain boundary. I do not want to assign these orientations to the other bodies in my structure. I have been doing this manually within Mechanical using the surface and edge guide:

My question is that if I can automate/script this element orientation process. I know the names of the bodies/geometries that need orientations. Is this possible to do? Enclosed is the CDB of the microstructure from the photo above. Please let me know if any extra information is needed

Thank you for your time,
Bhanuj

Synthetic.cdb

Find more posts tagged with

Mechanical

Ansys Workbench

scripting

Structures

MAPDL

Accepted answers

All comments

James Derrick

Hello! I'm not sure if I can help you but someone from @Structures-Scripting-Team might be able to!

Abel Ramos

Hello,

I think you could investigate using Named Selections for automatically applying the Element Orientation

In the example below, 3 NS have been created for body, face and edge:

You can automatically create and setup the Details window following these lines:

elemOrient=ExtAPI.DataModel.Project.Model.Geometry.AddElementOrientation()

nsbody = ExtAPI.DataModel.GetObjectsByName("MYBODY")[0]
nsface = ExtAPI.DataModel.GetObjectsByName("MYFACE")[0]
nsedge = ExtAPI.DataModel.GetObjectsByName("MYEDGE")[0]

elemOrient.BodyLocation=nsbody
elemOrient.SurfaceLocation=nsface
elemOrient.EdgeLocation=nsedge

After executing those lines, you should see a new Element Orientation object created with its proper assigment

Best Regards