Automatic naming of components

[slumdogengineer]

Hi all,

I am wondering if anyone knows how to automatically named components in a *do loop?

For example, say you have a number of areas, and each area is meshed with shells. What I want to do is, inside a *do loop, automatically select the nodes from each area, then name it "areanodes1" for area 1, "areanodes2" for area 2 and so on. The code would look something like this:

*do,areanumber,1,20 !Cycle through 20 areas
asel,,,,areanumber !Select area
nsla !Select nodes from area
cm,areanodes#1#,node !Make component from nodes
*enddo

You can see that what I want to do, is subsitute the loop number in the name of the component (where I have put the # signs), so that I end up with areanodes1, areanodes2 etc.

Does anyone know how to do this, or indeed if it is possible?

Many thanks,
Will

 

[Wecos]

I don't have Ansys open at the moment to test it, but I think the command would be (using the variable name in your example):

cm,areanodes%areanumbner%,node !Make component from nodes

 

[slumdogengineer]

Thanks, but I just tried that and it doesn't work. From what I can glean, enclosing a parameter name in % signs prevents the substitution of the parameter, so you would end up with the variable name there instead of the number. In any case, in the example you showed, when I run the file it defines each component as 'areanodes%areanumber%', ie no substitution occurs at all. It seems then that the % signs are only recognised if they occur at the start of the command field, otherwise they are interpreted as part of the command name.

Anyway, I have found a work-around, which is to define a character array with all the component names in it (time-consuming unfortunately), then take the component names from it in the do loop by referencing the appropriate index of the array. Not a very elegant solution, so if anyone has any better idea please let me know!!

Cheers,
will