Obtain nodal temperature NT of a set at every increment to use as input in user element (UEL)

[Lukas_B]

Hello,
i am working on a project where i want to access the nodal temperature of an axisymmetric element (CAX4RHT) in a coupled temperature displacement analysis at every increment with a user subroutine.
The nodal temperatures represent the surface temperature of a solid material (nodes are combined in a set). The nodal temperatures should be passed to an existing user element (user subroutine UEL) for every node at every increment, where a heat flux should be calculated. Maybe it is even possible to address and extract the specific node set in this user subrouine.
I am not sure where and how i should extract and store the nodal temperatures. It would be nice if the output could look something like an array with two collumns in which the first one would represents the node number and the second the corresponding temperature.
Thanks in advance.
Feel free to ask for more detail, if you think it would help you to answere my question.
Greetings Lukas

 

[FEA way]

It should be possible to access integration point temperatures (TEMP variable) using the USDFLD subroutine but it’s much more tricky (likely not possible in an easy way) when it comes to nodal temperatures.

 

[Lukas_B]

Hey, thank you for your answer. In case anyone else faces this problem I share my solution for this problem, since I somehow got it to work.
In the input file, where I define my user element (UEL), I changed the number of coordinates from COORD=2 (x and y) to 3 (x, y, and temperature) and in the following line added another DOF so that the UEL now has DOF 1,2,11. The nodes of interest are part of the UEL. I then could extract the nodal temperatures from the third row of the coords array, aswell as every third entry of the 'u' vector.