ANSYS keypoints rotation.

[Fuge]

Hi, Im working on a truss analysis project where I am trying to model a basic crane arm truss structure similar to this one:

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/590654/2/istockphoto_590654_crane.jpg

I plan to setup the keypoints and links as if the crane arm were perfectly horizontal since this makes the keypoint coordinates much simpler, and then rotate the entire truss to the correct angle.

However I don't know how to rotate the truss by a specified angle about the origin. I would appreciate it if someone here could help me figure this out.

Thanks,
- Fuge.

 

[Stringmaker]

Fuge,
This isn't too difficult to do. Try this:

csys, !specify coord sys

kgen !use imove=1 to move existing kp's

Another command you may find useful is the ktran command for copying/moving a pattern into another coordinate system.

Hope this helps.

-Brian

 

[Fuge]

Thanks Brian,

I found a way to work around my problem. I just modeled the truss as a sketch in Solidworks (which is really easy to do using simple constraints) and then exported the sketch to ANSYS ... and then asked ANSYS to give me the XYZ coords of all the keypoints that I was interested in.

Its a really crude way of doing it... but it's good enough for what I'm doing with ANSYS.

I'll try your way soon so that I can learn to do it the proper way.

Thanks for your help again,
- Fuge.