Exporting section info (area, inertia, etc) of elements in Nx 1

[Lumbisno]

Hello everyone, hope you are all doing well.
I'm learning how to use Nx for my first FEA college course and for our first assignment we have to design a structure that can support certain loads and make it as light as possible. The Nx result has to be validated by a MATLAB FEA code that we have to write partly ourselves.
Seeing as I will have to iterate my designs and my idea is to make a truss with different section elements according to how solicited each element is, I want to know if there is a way to export the section info for each element to a document I can then read in MATLAB. I can already export the node position and connections between nodes (elements) but I can't seem to find a way to access that last piece of info.
Any help would be very much appreciated.

 

[sdm919]

Are you using the NX Nastran solver? If so, read on, if not, ignore this reply...

The information you need should be in the "input" file, which usually has an extension .dat or .bdf or .blk

When you run a solution, it will write out this file in the background, and you may have not noticed it. However, you should be able to export this file any time you want without performing an analysis run.

Assuming you are using "axial only" members to model a truss, the elements would be CROD. The CROD card will refer to the 2 nodes which the element is connected to and it will point to a "property" card which is where it gets the section properties. The only section property you usually need for a truss is the area. The property card for a CROD elements is called a PROD. Refer to the software documentation for precise formatting of CROD, PROD, etc.

Once you get this data into MATLAB and perform your sizing, you can write out the updated section properties on new PROD cards, using the same format as the original PRODs, with only the area being different.

 

[Lumbisno]

That worked perfectly, I got all the data I needed, thank you

 

[rb1957]

How complicated is this "strcuture" ?

I think a key is going to be maximising the allowable load in each element.

It would be interesting to see if a determinate structure is lighter than an indeterminate one.

Do you have multiple loads, or only one ?

"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.