Learning Forum

[Susan]

Dear All,

I am new in Ansys. I want to do de-icing optimization by FENSAP-ICE. Is it possible to change the settings of heaters' power density and de-icing cycles or heating sequences by external codes or functions? Of course, if this could be set in the workbench, that would be very nice. Thank you very much.

[Isik Ozcer]

Hi Susan We don't have an officially supported way of customizing the de-icing heater cycles with external commands, but, it is not impossible. You can try the following at your own risk if you wish.
The cycles for heaters in C3D are saved in run_CHT3D/CHT_Compute/SOLID/bc.txt file. You could modify this file to change the de-icing cycles. The format of the file needs to be respected exactly. You can practice this on a simple case first, make sure everything works as expected, then carry on with your actual runs.
CHT_Compute directories are created after you click the Run button. To change the bc.txt file, you have to start the run in "null" queue which prepares everything but does not launch the execution script.
To have many runs of the same kind with varying bc.txt files, you can first create a dummy run to use as a template with the null queue method. Inside that run's CHT_Compute directory there is a file called .solvercmd. This is the main execution script for a FENSAP-ICE run. You need to delete the first line in that file which changes the directory to the current run's location. Once this run is created, you can go two levels up and make copies of the template run and change the bc.txt file for each. You will then have to manually start the execution scripts (.solvercmd) for each of these runs. You can either write a shell script to go into each directory and run the file, or setup a scheduler config file for your HPC machine and individually submit them to a queue.
In general we don't recommend changing the run files outside of the UI. There is no guarantee that cases prepared this way will work as expected. Technical support will be also limited for questions regarding such customization.

Best Regards Isik

[Susan]

Dear Isik Thank you so much for the detailed information. That's very good advice and I will try that in my case to see any possible.
At the same time, I am trying to optimise via workbench but I don't know how to define and set user-defined output parameters in fensap-ice module, so that I could do parametric optimization.
Do you have any ideas?
Thanks again.
Best wishes Susan