Can you use a CSV file as input to modify existing surface loads in mechanical?

Kaleb.Wood

Hello, I am new to the stress analysis roll at my company. I was given a model that applies 400+ forces, all of which are scoped by individual named selections. None of the named selections were defined by remote point (No remote points exist). Each Force is applied by surface effect with force components entered via tabular data. Other than manual input, is there a way for me to upload a .csv with named selection and force components to change the existing loads in the project? And if so, Am I able to specify during that import which load step I want to apply them to?

Mike.Thompson

This is definitely possible with mechanical API scripting. You would do the following steps:

1. Read the .csv data with the standard: import csv (module). You can find many reference on how to use that to read the lines and get the data to a list.
2. For each line, you need a Named Selection (NS) name. You should find if a force exists, and has: Force.Location == NS. If not, create a new force with that location.
3. Edit the values of each component, X,Y,Z. There are many examples of how to edit the component of a load by modifying its "DescreteValues"

ForceValues = [1,5,96]  #Assumed to be 'N'

Analysis = Force.Parent

EndTimes = Analysis.StepsEndTime

#Assumes time is in s for this example.

Force.XComponent.Inputs[0].DiscreteValues=[Quantity(V,"s") for V in EndTimes]

Force.XComponent.Output.DiscreteValues=[Quantity(V,"N") for V in ForceValues]

#repeate as needed for any other components of the force.