Learning Forum

[jwyatteckstrom]

Hello, 

I've made a tensile test simulation with an embedded artifact in the specimen and want to extract the data. I'd like to graph the strain as a function of area, but I don't know how to extract the data without the time consuming process of manually each spot. Does anyone know how to help? 

Also, when "Maximum Principle Strain" is extracted from a simulation, how do you determine which strain axis it's referring to?

[mjmiddle]

Insert "Strain > Vector Principal" to see the principal directions:

Any deformed area you want to compute will need to be done in an APDL command snippet. You can communicate Mechanical with APDL by putting geometry in a named selection. Then in the APDL code, use CMSEL,S,named_selection to select those nodes.

What are you trying to plot? A strain result is a contour plot whose values change over point locations on the geometry. Area is not a point entity. Are you trying to get the area of each element and plot against the strain at the centroid of each element? Or the effective area around a node against strain reported at that node? APDL has the function ARNODE() to compute effective area around a node. Or the area of an entire face plotted against the average strain over that entire face?